“... and reported to King Leopold that Albert lacked nothing in charm and attractiveness – ‘it may also be considered a fortunate circumstance that he has already a certain English look about him’ – but that he seemed deficient in strength of will and intellectual and moral force. ‘To pursue so difficult a political career a whole life through ...”

“... Permit Me Voyage, its title drawn from a line by Hart Crane with a tougher edge than the borrowing may indicate; an accomplished book, marred by an over-abundant proffered delicacy of sentiment – ‘the Chamber of Maiden-Thought’ shining sweetly but with too constant a glow. Agee soon found a regular job writing for Fortune, where in the mid-1930s he ...”

“... burdensome. Marital status, so useful for reputation management, brought few other benefits. Richard Cosway refused to allow Maria to practise professionally; Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun was only too keen for his wife to sell her work so that he could pocket the proceeds; and whatever happened in Kauffman’s brief first marriage was so upsetting that ...”

“... do not line up neatly in support of one another, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance and writing.’ Queen Anne is the most prominent example of a woman whose mixed loyalties resulted in ‘self-definition’. Her husband was reluctant to acknowledge her autonomous royal status as the ...”

“... The arguments about the miners’ strike will go on for a long time yet, as is evident from Richard Hyman’s piece on another page. My own view remains essentially what it was when I wrote what turned out to be a controversial article last summer (LRB, 6 September 1984). Mr Scargill’s demand that no pit be closed except on grounds of exhaustion was economic nonsense; his attempt to achieve his aims by extra-Parliamentary means which included violence and intimidation had to be defeated; but the support he enjoyed inside and outside the mining communities was an understandable reaction to a government indifferent to high unemployment and worsening poverty, and determined to ram highly contentious policies through Parliament despite the paucity of its electoral support ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South ...”

“... administered with a smile of feigned hospitality; and, whatever tactical pretences to piety they may at times be obliged to make, they are one and all irreligious sensualists, fatally wedded to the fleeting delights of the body. With appropriate slipperiness, these stock aspects of the favourite can all look like metaphors for one another, with the ...”

“... and nasty as his fish – Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub, May keep up the Play-club: There, sweepings do as well As the best-ordered meal.By the time Jonson wrote these lines, Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre – or, as almost everyone now agrees, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, co-written by Shakespeare and the ...”

“... types of Englishmen and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois ...”

“... For the last thirty years Richard Sennett – urban sociologist, historian, novelist – has been meditating on the culture and ecology of industrial cities: on how they evolved, on how their physical organisation and social structure related to the psychological and moral experiences of their inhabitants. More pointedly than his previous books, The Conscience of the Eye, he says, aims to show the interactions between the ‘architectural, urban planning, public sculpture, and the visual scenes of the city’ and its ‘cultural life ...”

“... duty to take this course,’ Pankhurst informed Asquith, ‘and I shall not give way, although it may end in my death.’ On 20 June, the front page of the Woman’s Dreadnought, the weekly newspaper Pankhurst had begun publishing a few months earlier, carried her shawl-clad, Madonna-like photograph under the banner headline ‘IS SHE TO DIE?’ Asquith, no ...”

“... past – which is only seven decades old – and the Soviet present in separate analytical boxes. Richard Pipes resisted the pressure to choose between historical and political specialisms. He matched his articles on Khrushchev and Brezhnev with works on the origins of Russian Marxism. His first book, on the foundation of the Soviet Union as a ...”

“... issued over the course of that summer by the CIA or the White House anti-terrorism co-ordinator, Richard Clarke, to the effect that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack inside the United States. Clarke’s name doesn’t appear in the index, or in any of the supplementary documents posted by Rumsfeld on his website, www. rumsfeld.com. Other sources attest ...”

“... in Parliament. All this, it is suggested, created difficulties for his successor and grandson, Richard II, and even laid some of the foundations for the Wars of the Roses. These views have not gone unchallenged. In the 1950s May McKisack wrote a sturdy defence of Edward (rightly praised by Mortimer). Then, in the 1980s ...”

“... now seem almost ordinary: Sure, he towelled, if it is this fair way that answers up to you, you may dismiss the vowels because one does not remember the yak that does not immediately remember one. One does not scan the roads for politeness or contribute to the desert economy. And lo what he said became true for everyone on earth and there was no parallel ...”