“... and Powell, but he was not destined to be on the backbenches for long. In a debate on the NHS he rose to take on the speaker all Tories feared most, Aneurin Bevan. A few months later, Churchill made him Minister of Health. Macleod was so shaken that he had to go to a phone box to find out where on earth his ministry was. He announced that he would be the ...”

“... seemed an ordeal for her; it was as if the camera hurt her. But while many hostile to the movies rose in defence of the devastation of Marilyn Monroe – whether or not she was a sentient victim – Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive ...”

“... and in this its title supports me, for, though West is discussing Robert Elsmere, The Case of Richard Meynell and Daphne, the ethos that Mrs Humphry Ward puts forward is the only thing that really interests her. Even when she comments that on every relevant page the face of the heroine Catherine Leyburn ‘works with emotion and is illuminated by a ...”

“... desires and concedes that the power rests on language alone. An apostrophe such as Blake’s ‘O rose, thou art sick’ figuratively closes the gap between the post-Enlightenment poet and the natural object he addresses. Yet ‘it figures this reconciliation as an act of will, as something to be accomplished poetically in the act of apostrophising; and ...”

“... his contemporaries, like Cranmer, burned in Oxford, and William Gardiner, burned in Lisbon. ‘Une rose d’automne est plus qu’une autre exquise,’ Mme Yourcenar remarks, ‘was written not by Ronsard to celebrate some aging beauty but by d’Aubigné to glorify a belated martyr of the Reformation’. When d’Aubigné escaped burning, through the offices ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... of the 15th Hussars at the age of 34 for £35,000, something like £2 million today, and then rose after a fashion to command the Light Brigade. Such officers were expected to look good on the parade ground, but they regarded the serious study of tactics as beneath a gentleman’s dignity. Few senior officers emerge with credit from Figes’s ...”

“... they were permitted to operate, and who in turn took their place in a chain of command that rose all the way to the presidency. This arrangement ran smoothly until marijuana’s newfound popularity led Richard Nixon to declare a ‘war on drugs’ and to begin putting pressure on the Mexican government to staunch the ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a codpiece is bewitched to ...”

“... Wilkinson’s book, although only in passing).Muhammad Ali lifted the export ban, however, to let Richard Lepsius ship antiquities to Berlin. The head of a Prussian expedition that retraced the savants’ steps in the 1840s, Lepsius made his first visit to the pyramids on 15 October 1842, Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s birthday. On the pyramid of Khufu, his team ...”

“... But her very existence, in its unapologetic vitality, was enough to provoke. The graphic designer Richard Hollis, a contemporary at Wimbledon, found her ‘over-lush, you could say. I don’t know if you’d call it pushy.’ Of her work he says: ‘It’s direct, energetic, and I think that’s how she was … Her work looks quite confident, which is what ...”

“... childhood, but in 1962 she published the first of several stories about a fictional couple named Rose and Herbert Derdon who have long since lost the thread of love bur remain obsessed with each other. They are filled with guilt and shame and fear. One of the finest stories, ‘The Drowned Man’, begins:After his wife died, Mr Derdon was very anxious to get ...”

“... widespread influence: on directors such as Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and David Fincher, and on the critics in whose work I was immersing myself, the so-called ‘Paulettes’ who populated the culture sections of American publications (notably David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek). But not only them. Kael had ...”

“... they opened the bag to show the guards, it appeared no longer to hold her head but to be full of rose petals.This is constantly happening to me.But what is more difficult to explain is the way the pattern pulls people and dialogue towards it as well. Sometimes it even seems to create them. This is another reason to write essays – during the period of ...”