“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... 1950s, Browning’s Kentish Sir Byng reappeared as Ezra Pound’s ‘Duke Liu’: Duke Liu, the frank, unhoused, unhapped, from bound to bourne put all barned corn in sacks and ration bags for glorious use, stretched bow showed shield, lance, dagger-axe and squared to the open road. Of course the Browningesque cadences are not replicated; they are a murmur ...”

“... My contention would be that this is a large mistake and that Williams more nearly represents, as Michael Walzer puts it, ‘the failure of English political writing’. As usual, one glimpses the man best through his essays, a fair selection of which are published in Resources of Hope. It is fair to say that many of the essays in Resources of Hope blend into ...”

“... area and cuts across gender, class, social background and occupation’. Yet in a suicidally frank interview given in the autumn, Mandelson presented himself as the antithesis of a poll-watching office-seeker and sneered at the pygmies who surrounded him in government. ‘They’re always sitting on the fence. At the first sign of controversy they run ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell, about two years; and that the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’. Of the good people in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion we know nothing more than what is written; for before those works were published their author had been taken ...”

“... had changed his mind about the authenticity of the ‘diaries’. Why, then, did he not inform Frank Giles, editor of the Sunday Times, who was left to hear the frightful news from Lord Dacre when his first edition was already on the trains? The Porter sections on political lying and fabrication provide essential evidence for the New Bullying. In that ...”

“... German critics; they concentrate rather selectively on minor and largely non-dramatic works. As Frank Trommler says in a sceptical Afterword (to my mind, the most perceptive part of the book), these essays show ‘to what a large degree his work is used as a vehicle for contemporary concerns, to what extent he is cast as a guru for artistic ...”

“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... are prime cases of holiday destinations with these unattractive qualities. The guides are frank, on the whole, about Morocco’s unlawful occupation of the Western Sahara, which has now been going on for more than twenty years with the result that at least 100,000 of the territory’s indigenous people are stranded in refugee camps in Algeria while ...”

“... viable kingdom of the North between the Humber and the Forth-Clyde isthmus,’ the historian Frank Musgrove claimed in 1990. It wasn’t the best moment to use the present tense, even if there had been an upsurge in commentary on the ‘North-South divide’ over the previous decade. Tom Hazeldine suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political ...”

“... defeated by the union block vote, until he became deputy leader shortly before his death thanks to Frank Cousins, the left-wing leader of the TGWU. His appointment to Attlee’s cabinet after the war can be seen as a concession to the party’s left. As editor of Labour’s house organ, Tribune, Bevan had become the left’s figurehead, and a more effective ...”

“... the phrase famously in Bleak House. Corton, however, finds it in the caption to an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature ...”

“... for instance (from the Dardanelles to Dakar, to Cologne, to Italy’s underbelly, to the murder of Frank Thompson), or Spender’s lachrymose sense that his (exceedingly brief) Communism had threatened to destroy his individual identity. But fairly promptly the CIA would import such heavy weaponry as Lionel Trilling, with his banging declarations that Western ...”

“... collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of place. It’s true that he is quite often doing ...”