“... pledged to end the ‘absurdity’ of conferring political power by heredity (a stance which it took to apply to the House of Lords but not the monarchy). The Daily Mail’s continuing outrage that the ‘Michaels’ can squat Kensington Palace for a rent that wouldn’t cover a bus shelter anywhere else in the borough (defending his lifestyle, Prince ...”

“... that such a tag would seem appropriate to describe any other poet of the 20th century. Why her? John Ashbery’s praise for Bishop as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’, whose work ‘inspires in writers of every sort’ an ‘extraordinarily intense loyalty’, seems apt. And Ashbery knew that to say such a thing might be to pay ‘an ambiguous ...”

“... Adam Smith, was the theory of the marketplace of ideas. In the mouth of Justice Holmes, echoing John Stuart Mill, this became part of the jurisprudence of the First Amendment: ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’ John Banville, Shroud ‘I had jumped​ ,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a moment later: ‘It seems.’ Marlow, the narrator of the novel who is listening to Jim’s story, says: ‘Looks like it.’ This is one of many instances where Marlow’s language is drier and tougher than his thought, which is unwilling to condone Jim’s act but very sympathetic to the difficulty of living with the memory of it ...”

“... work suggests, someone whose losses to date were reimbursed by a philanthropist, or who took an amnesia-inducing drug that led him to think he was starting tabula rasa, would have a lower propensity to take risks. The subject’s assessment of the starting position influences whether she takes a prudent or a risk-seeking approach to a given schedule ...”

“... but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority’. He is particularly annoyed by the late John Plamenatz, who contrasted ‘the healthy “civic nationalism” of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts’. Annoyed not least because Professor Plamenatz of All Souls was actually a Montenegrin. Given the ...”

“... again with Scottish and English Protestants in Ulster under James I. None of the plantations fully took root: some of the Old English went native, and the ‘meer’ (or ‘wild’) indigenous Irish remained vigorous. The Irish Rebellion of 1641 resulted in the slaughter of Ulster Protestant settlers: in England, a figure of 300,000 dead quickly ...”

“... million bikes in Germany on the eve of the war, underlining yet again that most Germans cycled or took public transport to work and thought of the motor car, if they thought of it at all, as a leisure vehicle. Ordinary Germans were right to be sceptical about the savings scheme. Not one saver got a Volkswagen: the money all went into arms production. So did ...”

“... At some time in the past the idea took hold that social justice was all about the state’s hoovering up resources and then blowing them at needy or deserving recipients. Some of these resources, money for example, were material, and others, like opportunities, were virtual. But there were various problems. One was that there had to be just one hoover, the state, sucking in goods, although other providers, being plural, threatened to disrupt the favoured distribution by shunting them around for purposes of their own ...”

“... Germany. Bernhardt made a good deal of money out of these transactions, but it was Göring who took the lead in the exploitation of the Spanish economy. He was already commissioner for raw materials and foreign exchange, and on 18 October 1936 he became Reich Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, a new economic strategy designed to prepare the country ...”

“... it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a man has a vast grudge against is the man’s determinant’. Something similar seems to be true of ...”

“... over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship to Oxford. John Peet ended up as head of the Reuters bureau in Berlin, before defecting to the East in 1950. Gavin Ewart, whose poems now seem the high-spot of Out of Bounds, went to Cambridge with an exhibition to read classics; he left Wellington with some farewell verses ...”

“... American writing that have flourished and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”