“... courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families. Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel that one discusses ...”

“... mediators who could work with financial bigwigs because they also came from that environment. Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible ...”

“... happily alone at the huge dining room table, ringing for every course. The much repeated story of Prince Aly Khan lighting her first cigarette found its punchline in ‘Angel’s Laundromat’: ‘He didn’t have a match actually.’ Here you see the first flourishing of the fact that she was one of the people who drew grace from others, who brought out ...”

“... the light of what we learn about the decisions and beliefs of a man who was for a while the crown prince of social democracy. Nor are the questions of merely historical interest, since Jenkins’s career continues to frame our sense of the progressive political possibilities for the early 21st century. Were the travails of the Labour Party in the later ...”

“... humble/devoted/faithful servant’ – these terms are fossils of what the historian Peter Laslett called ‘the world we have lost’, a world in which virtually all social relations, no matter how intimate, were defined by the language and ideology of service.To sense how this was so, we have only to look at the literature of the early modern ...”

“... a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the bosom. How would she not make anyone nervous? Peter Bradshaw has written that Taylor and Clift ‘are almost like reflections of each other; when they kiss, something incestuous and thrillingly forbidden throbs out of the screen.’ Charlie Chaplin told Stevens it was ‘the greatest film ever made about ...”

“... of the very best recent criticism of Jane Austen has been in essays (those by John Bayley and by Peter Conrad stand out) but there is one brilliant full-length study, Roger Gard’s Jane Austen’s Novels, that serves as the best possible introduction to her work. And Gard does notice Margaret: he calls her ‘the one completely superfluous figure in Jane ...”

“... worse fates: his siblings were incarcerated and one of his sisters killed herself.The fable of the prince in the cave, while broadly accurate, is merely the authorised story. The biographies published by the party all share the theme of Xi triumphing over adversity and working long hours for the party while managing to stay close to the soul of the people. In ...”

“... powerfully built, garrulous man in his mid-sixties. A pupil at Gordonstoun at the same time as Prince Charles, cousin to a baronet with a large estate in Suffolk, he combines a confident, commanding air and the love of a good story with a peevish ability to articulate complaints in such a way that aligns his personal disadvantage with the disadvantage to ...”

“... the white emptiness of your glass & thought it would never be filled.’ There was something of Prince Mishkin about Jones: his confounding candour, his obstacle-like presence in the room. If you could not marry him it was unclear what finally was to be done with him. You could look out for him, as so many did, or confide in him, as did several straying ...”

“... names from the national memory? The public made Jimmy Savile. It loved him. It knighted him. The Prince of Wales accorded him special rights and the authorities at Broadmoor gave him his own set of keys. A whole entertainment structure was built to house him and make him feel secure. That’s no one’s fault: entertainment, like literature, thrives on ...”

“... was now off duty, visiting his fiancée. On the evening of 19 June, they were watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air at her house in East Belfast when two masked gunmen knocked at the door and then forced their way inside. They shot Tony five times, killing him instantly.An investigation was launched and in February 1993 Noel Thompson, a taxi driver who had ...”

“... This produced such aperçus from Johnson as – in response to an anti-lockdown article by Peter ‘Bonkers’ Hitchens – ‘My heart is with Bonkers. I don’t believe in any of this, it’s all bullshit. I wish I’d been the mayor in Jaws and kept the beaches open.’ And – in response to data showing that the median age of people dying of Covid ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”