“... clue is in the name … the Party of workers, not shirkers.’ Byrne rented an apartment in County Hall overlooking the Thames, costing £2400 a month, courtesy of the taxpayer, and once claimed £400 of public money for food in a single month, quite legitimately in each case. Another example, more drastic, from the Conservatives: ‘...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote about each picture painted by Brooks, her long-term ...”

“... have been a terrifying scene. The barons led by Montfort and Hugh Bigod marched into Westminster Hall in full armour, though they had the decency to leave their swords outside. Henry instantly appreciated the severity of his plight. ‘What is this, my lords, am I, poor wretch, your prisoner?’ In theory, he wasn’t, or not yet, but over the years of ...”

“... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...”

“... during the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th ...”

“... day after the annual holiday commemorating the October revolution. On the floor of the exhibition hall of the institute, among the wreckage of the exhibition itself – including Pushkin’s death mask, broken into several pieces – lies the lifeless body of Lyova Odoevtsev, whose history Bitov then relates. Born at the height of the Stalinist terror in ...”

“... forged in battle and further reinforced by the rituals of the aristocracy. Carousing together in a hall, young warriors would be regaled with stories of the deeds of their ancestors and their heroes, stories that confirmed their perception of themselves as a group. In this respect 12th-century Flanders was not so different from the world of Beowulf and ...”

“... Elsewhere he notes the exclusion of the vernacular, the dialects of business, trade, music-hall, barrack-room, bar-room and those professional discourses not represented in the old universities. The OED has generally disregarded the lower classes and their rich argots, and relegated women and minorities as providers of source ...”

“... campaign for the mayoralty, which the long-serving Tom Bradley is about to relinquish. Businessman Richard Riordan, one of 24 candidates to succeed him, seems to be promising that all the unpleasantness of South Central will somehow be removed. He puts it less plainly even than this, however: his paid-for advertising slots include a sound-bite in which a ...”

“... and that ‘almost every character is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe ...”

“... agriculture, and the institutions of America’s penal system. Narrating the ride to jail is Romy Hall, a 29-year-old stripper and single mother who has been given a double life sentence for murdering a man who stalked her. The year is 2003. Her first parole hearing will be in 37 years’ time. She has been in jail for two years already, long enough to learn ...”

“... dummy. A mixture of the surreal, the whimsical and the macabre, with touches of the English music-hall tradition, its overdetermined atmosphere of seedy blowsiness is vaguely reminiscent of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film of The Entertainer as well as early Graham Greene. The style is distinctive in the way it wanders in and out of interiority, with ...”

“... R.S. Thomas in 1996, was mostly about the poet’s Salinger-like resistance to his attentions; and Richard Burton’s recent effort on Bunting fills in the blanks by taking the poet’s work as straight biographical evidence, never the wisest course of action, much less where the author of Briggflatts is concerned.* Philip Larkin’s post-biography/Selected ...”