“... wake of the great debate of the 1940s and 1950s that was dominated by R.H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill and Trevor-Roper himself. Its focus was the economic causes of the war. The conflicting hypotheses about the wealth and power of the aristocracy and gentry, about the waning of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and about the relationship ...”

“... which Nixon railed and to which Kissinger reported. Today, the only way the Republicans can hope to win the coming presidential election is by promising not coexistence but perpetual conflict. It is hard to reconcile Dallek’s Kissinger – jealous, sycophantic, duplicitous and striving – with the one in Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the ...”

“... eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago’.In America, he met the young journalist Hope Hale. Like all the women Cockburn was involved with, she was hotly radical and stubbornly self-reliant. They had to be: he moved with ease from job to job and woman to woman. According to Patrick Cockburn, Hale was fascinated ‘by Claud’s blend of ...”

“... entire output. It is gay, funny, macabre, tender and with an abundance of his sardonic wit, and I hope that my interpretation of these moods will in turn be transformed into a portrait of “Hitch”.’ This gesture was not enough to repair the rift that had opened up after their bitter disagreement over the Torn Curtain soundtrack. But it does confirm that ...”

“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... retranslations of the same old texts – which is not self-evidently a good thing – we might hope that at least some of them would be done by classicists who are younger, or less white, or less male.Of course, it is quite easy for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired old vision of the same old texts. More ...”

“... merely a literary sensibility but a governing creed. For the Augustinian philosopher of history Christopher Dawson, fascism and liberal democracy were just two varieties of the fallen state.Although the sinister Merry England of the Distributists never came to pass, they did inspire artists who despaired of flourishing under capitalism. The sculptor Eric ...”

“... right hand. It is a kind of ritual, a purging of the past, the key representing the last physical hope of ever returning to the land that was Palestine and is now Israel. ‘Your Uncle George locked the front door,’ she said. ‘You see, we thought we would only be leaving for fourteen or fifteen days, until the fighting died down. So we took a few clothes ...”

“... hills. This is where you find Tibbie Shiel’s Inn, where the Blackwood’s boys James Hogg and Christopher North used to come to liquefy their rhetoric. We entered from a smirr of rain, snoking for supper. It turned out supper was something that happened in the glen before 6.30 p.m. A lady in a white lab coat emerged to remind us of the fact. The phrase ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... Cherkley Court, and there would open the interconnecting door between her bedroom and his in the hope that she would signify consent by leaving it ajar. Once, when he was talking about a woman with whom he (rightly) suspected Pincher was having an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s got a big bush!’ Pincher ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... The radical English Protestant sects – Diggers, Ranters, Seekers and the like – applauded by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down (1972) challenged ecclesiastical hierarchies by maintaining that all matter was endued with spirit, that God was present in the fabric of nature, even that God and nature were one. No need for an external spiritual ...”

“... short distance from the centre-left to the reactionary right. In 2009, he hailed the neocon writer Christopher Caldwell, who had claimed that Muslims are ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’, as a brilliant seer, who understood the consequences of undermining ‘national tradition’ with ‘liberal universalism’. It may be unfair to pick on ...”

“... the movement in which the Party was rooted had a life of its own. However often their argosies of hope foundered on the rocks of bureaucracy, Maxton, Jennie Lee and other ‘visionaries’ did articulate cries for fairness and friendship which had deeply-rooted popular support. If Labour is losing credibility as the voice of such values, it does not follow ...”