“... Harper.The relationship began to break down in the 1990s. In 1992 Ken Clarke, home secretary under John Major, announced an ambitious plan to reform policing. He described the police to Harper as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’: excessively bureaucratic (the Met most of all, with five senior ranks of officer rather than the usual ...”

“... a play he hopes to write about a third-century Corsican tight-rope walker. On occasions Roussel took active steps to preserve his own literary papers, depositing various manuscripts with his financial adviser, Eugène Leiris – father of Michel – not all of which have come to light. By the time of his departure for Sicily, however, Roussel seems to have ...”

“... families of their donors), and it would soon give rise to a distinct interior aesthetic. Just as John Fowler, who would become the Trust’s favoured ‘decorator’ in the late Fifties, scorned the idea of ‘design’, James Lees-Milne distinguished the true country-house interior from the ‘contrived “old world” flavour’ of an architect like ...”

“... than with the interests of reason and truth. Territorial imperatives were clearly at stake when John Searle (in a recent number of the New York Review of Books) gave a simplified account of Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, and used it to launch an attack on this whole new breed of overweening literary theorists. From this point of view, deconstruction ...”

“... fact that you can tell, just by looking at it, that any sentence of the syntactic form P and Q (‘John swims and Mary drinks’, as it might be) is true only if P and Q are both true. ‘You can tell just by looking’ means: to see that the entailments hold, you don’t have to know anything about what either P or Q means and you don’t have to know ...”

“... a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which John Brown’s raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old days. And there remains the lingering mystery of what ...”

“... more or less the practice of editors ever since. The six drafts were, however, printed together in John Murray’s edition of 1896, and Womersley has taken the lead in insisting that this is the source the student of Gibbon must use. He is right; but Murray’s volume has never been reprinted, and we need a new edition, whether electronic or ...”

“... speak, under their feet. But it is hard not to speculate about what might have been different had John Smith lived to become prime minister in Blair’s stead. Whether you approve of it or not, Blair’s success in outflanking the traditional party of the right from within the traditional party of the left was achieved with remarkable rhetorical and political ...”

“... voluntary, we blasted out a paean to ‘the young shepherdess in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan ...”

“... translation is talking about too many other things. I was offered the job of general editor and took it. Everything I suggested was agreed to; but we couldn’t find enough translators, so we had, in the end, ten translators for 16 volumes. And there was a practising analyst involved: me. When I was offered the general editorship, and when I accepted it, I ...”

“... the aim of turning him into an educated French child, although he ultimately conceded defeat and took Victor to live in the Paris institute for deaf-mutes. Séguin built on this work and in 1840 established the first private institution in Paris dedicated to children with special educational needs. In 1846, he published a book about his experiences. Children ...”

“... Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in an episode where the knight Astolfo is brought to the moon by St John the Evangelist; they travel in Elijah’s chariot. Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata includes a scene closely modelled on the ‘Somnium’. Paradise Lost is full of journeys up and views down; its closest imitation of the classical view from above comes near ...”

“... with another dog, Emily waded in at once while ‘several other animals,’ the Haworth stationer John Greenwood reported, ‘who thought themselves men, were standing looking on like cowards as they were.’ She forced the dogs apart, ‘dredg[ing] well their noses with pepper’ and sent them packing. When Branwell drunkenly set light to his ...”

“... and obesity as ‘an excessive accumulation of body fat’. During the 1970s, the Body Mass Index took hold, the ratio of the weight of a person in kilogrammes divided by the square of their height in metres. In 1998, the World Health Organisation, in company with numerous national bodies, defined being overweight as having a BMI of more than 25, and obesity ...”

“... with High Windows and inscribed it: ‘From a drought to a flood.’What a put-down.Lowell took it as a compliment.I’m sure he would. From this costive Englishman.Yes, a tribute to his fertility.You carried your preoccupation with Lowell from the ‘Review’ to the ‘New Review’, didn’t you? How did the latter magazine come into existence?The ...”