“... diorama. According to the Sunday Times, Pat Wall, Prospective Labour MP (Militant), Has risen on hirsute hind legs to bawl A vintage load of Jacobinist cant, Insisting that the Monarch, Lords and all Such privileged figures strangely yet extant, Must forthwith holus-bolus be abolished Or strictly speaking physically demolished. Wild Wall ...”

“... Exclusion Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the Immortal Seven who in 1688 invited William of Orange ...”

“... Starmer’s victory has looked certain for months, but his personal approval ratings have never risen above lukewarm; they are unlikely to improve in office. In this election, it was enough to be the other guy.The holding pattern is over: Starmer now has the opportunity to ‘roll up his sleeves’, as he has so often said he wants to do, and get to ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I ...”

“... The Haw Lantern (1987) inaugurated a poetry suddenly hospitable to discussions of the soul – ‘Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere’, as one poem has it – and the visionary. Heaney seemed to have taken a pew in George Herbert’s glassy church. In ‘Fosterling’, in his next book, Seeing Things, Heaney writes wonderingly about himself as ‘Me ...”

“... in a London gallery, there’s more to it than a shared interest in contemporary art, as Henry James explains with just a faint smack of the lips. ‘It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the oddest ...”

“... in throughout Mackenzie’s writing career, many from unexpectedly distinguished sources. Henry James may well have been influenced by Mackenzie’s good looks. He had been so swept away by Rupert Brooke’s appearance that it had been quite a relief to be told he was not a very good poet. But about Mackenzie he was rhapsodic, considering him by far the ...”

“... Nathan Mayer’s only competitor for the title of richest man in Europe was his youngest brother, James, founder of the Paris branch. Last year was the bicentenary of the arrival of Nathan Mayer Rothschild in England and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, chairman of N.M. Rothschild and Sons, proposed a history of the House to Ferguson as a fitting way to commemorate ...”

“... appears in the film Fuses (1964-67), edited from months of footage of Schneemann and her partner, James Tenney, having sex at home. In some sections, she employed the shot-reverse-shot sequencing of Hollywood cinema: we see the couple on the bed, then the cat staring towards the camera, then the couple again. We begin to wonder if we are the cat. Could ...”

“... the UN has acquired an unprecedented global prominence. Kofi Annan’s career, as described by James Traub in The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power, illustrates the possibilities and the pitfalls of this new world role. Having risen through the ranks to become under-secretary general for ...”

“... climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with ...”

“... from Andrewes’s sermon on the role of the Magi in the Nativity story, preached at the court of James I at Christmas 1622, was to be incorporated virtually word for word into the opening lines of the 1927 poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’: ‘A cold coming they had of it, at this time of the yeare; just the worst time of the yeare . . . the waies ...”

“... was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...”

“... account of the court’s attitude to popular drama. It has become orthodox to assert that James I tied the theatre much more closely to the state than had Elizabeth I, increasing its prestige while decreasing its independence. Barroll demolishes this hypothesis, systematically and irresistibly. James’s own ...”

“... pocket-slim volumes of the Buildings of England, take years to complete each hefty replacement. James Bettley, responsible for the new Essex volume, did not even have to bother with Ilford, Romford, Leyton and Walthamstow. With the setting up of the GLC and the new administrative boundaries of 1965, Essex, as the blurb to the Shell Guide quaintly puts ...”