“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1918, Capablanca, the famously instinctive Cuban prodigy, played the Ruy Lopez opening against Frank Marshall and was presented with a new, ingenious, aggressive defence. Marshall, it turned out, had kept his innovation unrevealed for ten years, waiting to unleash it on the player he most wanted to beat. Capablanca saw the prepared series of attacks and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (1987), Ilan Pappé, Yossi Amitai, Uri Bar-Joseph, Michael Cohen and Uri Milstein. In 1948 and After Morris wrote of his generation of Israeli historians: ‘Most of them, born around 1948, have matured in a more open, doubting and self-critical Israel than the pre-1967, pre-1973 and pre-Lebanon War Israel of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... UK Power Networks and SGN. A number of other former Labour MPs work as industry lobbyists. Michael Dugher is chair of the Betting & Gaming Council – an industry that has donated almost £400,000 to Labour since Starmer ran for leader. ‘I’d be shocked if there isn’t a lobbying scandal in the first year,’ a veteran lobby journalist who covered ...”

“... whenever he could to attend meetings of kindred spirits, including journalists and writers such as Michael Foot, Tom Hopkinson (of Picture Post), Tom Harrisson (of Mass Observation), Alastair Forbes and Stephen King-Hall, some of whom became Observer contributors when Astor took charge. But that was years away. In the meantime he started to work for Louis ...”

“... of life scarcely settles the question. An anti-Muslim alarmist and advocate of multiple wars like Frank Gaffney can think that Trump is on his side. So, with as much reason, can an anti-interventionist like Buchanan. Events will not allow Trump to profit much longer from this calculated ambiguity. Besides, the deeper danger of his populism, as Jan-Werner ...”

“... write to. In the winter of 1841-2, he writes to the children of his sister Nicoline Kristine: to Michael (three times), to Carl (three times) and to Sofie (once or twice); and to the children of his sister Petrea Severine: three times to Henriette, whom he addresses as Jette, and even, once, to Vilhelm. And what were the ages of these young ...”

“... At the heart of How to Be Gay is an analysis of scenes from two famous films, Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) and Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981), which present two versions of mother-daughter conflict as well as two versions of Joan Crawford, the original (almost invisible under the layers of subsequent ...”

“... National Museum and the Natural History Museum), his diaries remain in England. They were seen by Michael Collins and Eamon Duggan during the 1921 Treaty negotiations. In the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know ...”