“... but pleasing, somehow, to me. I was nudged in his direction by my graduate supervisor at Oxford, John Bayley, a wonderfully subtle and wide-ranging critic who as far as I’m aware never wrote about Firbank himself. I was embarking on an MLitt thesis looking at the way gay British writers, in the early and mid-20th century, had negotiated the necessary ...”

“... who answered ‘no, probably not’ presumably exercised some hermeneutic charity and took that answer to indicate a lack of certainty about hell’s existence rather than any uncertainty about their own beliefs.) Unfortunately, those who had already answered positively the question about ‘heaven’ were not then asked: ‘So what do you think ...”

“... appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to ...”

“... also joined the Fabians, encouraged by Hugh Dalton, the postwar Labour chancellor. He took it seriously, did a lot of reading, especially about the Webbs’ Minority Report on Poor Law reform, and in the summer of 1910, at the end of his year as president of the Cambridge society, he and Dudley Ward toured the West Country in a caravan, speaking ...”

“... chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying ...”

“... And Horace Walpole christened her the Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the ...”

“... since before the war, was shocked at ‘his face … unimaginably creased and craggy’: ‘it took me some time to rediscover the young face I had known beneath this new mask. Then the two merged and after that I always saw him with a kind of double vision.’ Auden’s admirers have often been drawn to think about him in terms of double vision: some of ...”

“... forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon. Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as well? Waxman’s committee ...”

“... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...”

“... and will continue to be, inevitable. The first of these topics is guilty pleas. The Commission took the view that there is nothing wrong in principle with encouraging a defendant who has committed the offence with which he or she is charged to plead guilty. The decision should only be taken with legal advice after the prosecution case has been fully ...”

“... eclecticism’ weren’t Europeans, but Orientals; they were the ones who took the fullest intellectual and artistic advantage not only of the advent of Europe but of the fact of the ‘Orient’, the ‘correction’ and ‘expansion’ of ‘the old humanism of the Mediterranean basin’. It’s in this context that I want to situate ...”

“... says he has no memory of such a meeting.) The defining drama of Netanyahu’s life as a young man took place in July 1976, when Yoni was killed at Entebbe airport, during a mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages from Air France Flight 139, which had been hijacked by four members of a German cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The ...”

“... the idea of universal human rights with the greatest vigour in the 1940s. But when New Labour took power in 1997, with its talk of human rights and ethical foreign policy, its future role as a quasi-colonial power was somehow not anticipated. Equally unanticipated was the long reach of Article 3, with its prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading ...”

“... after the death of the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (another Nobel laureate) in 1910; and clearly took it seriously. It gave him an opportunity to influence Norwegian society. So all those novels about the flight from the countryside and the corruption brought about by city life and the English were more than explorations of the psyche: they were intended as ...”

“... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...”