“... have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds each, a sum that pays for a ...”

“... of normal life. Some of them had kept the newspaper cuttings describing their crimes, and they took pictures of one another, delighted with themselves, and would gather round to stare at the results. They would swap these pictures and pin them up and show them to any girls who were adventurous enough to come near the school.It would take me years to work ...”

“... his performance. Steroids, for Bonds, were evidence not of the duplicity of the players who took them but of the hypocrisy of the baseball establishment that allowed them to get away with it. Bonds didn’t see McGwire’s inflated torso and equally inflated bank balance as a sign that baseball was cheating the public; rather, it was a sign that ...”

“... country. One daughter is an architect; the other daughter and the son are, like him, lawyers. ‘I took my son to make his first appearance in the Supreme Court,’ he said. ‘He looked at the portraits of the old judges and there he saw his grandfather.’ Youssef Hakim, Jacques’s father, had been an Ottoman-trained jurist who served on the Court during ...”

“... new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet and Critic, an interesting edition of Hughes’s correspondence with Keith Sagar, we have yet another ...”

“... knowing that Mary was eventually bent to God’s plan. And, perhaps for the first time, Minnie took pity on her child self. In fragmented entries she recalled ‘Ed. coming. Fear of him. Love? Always a strain.’ It was ‘a terrible time. Dreary, helpless. From the first the most fatal thing was the strain on my conscience of the position toward Edward ...”

“... end of a long winter hunger – ‘They are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his ...”

“... was taken to Berlin, where it belonged to the cellist and teacher Hugo Becker, with whom Hermann took lessons. It was transported to London and finally to the Museo del Violino in Cremona, where it had been made three centuries earlier.The protagonists of the final – comic – story are the ‘world’s most famous shipwrecked cello’, the ...”

“... these new places, in our Ayrshire, that spoke of the lives we were supposed one day to live. We took it for granted – much too early, as it turned out – that farming was a thing of the past, a thing people did before they were sophisticated like us. We never considered the stuff on our plates; we thought the school milk came on a lorry from ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... Queen’s Counsel. Still, as long as it’s men in wigs ... The real problem is the one to which John Griffith and others have repeatedly called attention: that the judiciary comes very largely from a tranche of society whose values, culture, données and attitudes are homogeneous because they are socially and educationally inbred. Less attention has perhaps ...”

“... and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day Lewis, a career poet and professor). There are in fact two versions of the story of the genesis of ...”

“... of much of the political game.’ But there is another side to the SDP, as it subsequently took shape, consisting of social democrats who, in 1979, saw no advantage in leaving Labour for a putative centre party. Shirley Williams spoke for many when she said it would have ‘no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values’. Today there are still ...”

“... curving folds falling from belt to feet is Gothic – but, who knows, she might be less so if she took it off. She looks especially Gothic from above, but this cannot have been the view which we were expected to take and so Beck excludes shots looking down at her from his otherwise comprehensive photographic survey. The sweeping lines on the effigy of Ilaria ...”