“... permanent under secretary to the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, sent a private letter to Colonel Ralph Fletcher, a Bolton magistrate, informing him of ‘the opinion long since formed by his Lordship that your Country will not be tranquillised, until Blood shall have been shed either by the Law or the sword. Lord Sidmouth will not fail to be prepared for ...”

“... a uniter, not a divider,’ said George W., the candidate who spoke at the segregated Bob Jones University. Not according to the map: the division preceded the vote, but the vote confirmed it. The results also show a gender gap. Thank God women have more sense than men; too bad there aren’t more of them, or they can’t vote twice. Bush rode ...”

“... there was the drinking. Bruce died in 1974. After an interval, his widow gave his papers to Nigel Jones, whose 1991 biography of Hamilton was followed two years later by a less substantial Life written by Sean French. Between them, these biographers raised their subject to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling pre-colour ...”

“... it does in the case of Meredith and Thackeray. (There is even something self-limiting about Tom Jones as a novel – for the same kind of reason?) As Furbank points out, the novels of Thackeray, Meredith and Trollope frequently take their very form from a social absolute – who is and who isn’t – which must be fundamentally unreal. ‘Evan Harrington ...”

“... is American schoolkids downloading the Starr report and Penthouse’s free photo-set of ‘Paula Jones – Nude!’ for their civics classes. The press were no exception: they, too, got the computer revolution all wrong. Over the last three years leading British and American newspapers (Times, Telegraph, LA Times) have invested heavily in ‘electronic ...”

“... Iraq. Annan, denying any knowledge of the contracts, hired Clinton’s defence counsel in the Jones-Lewinsky affair to ward off charges of corruption. The Volcker Commission, set up by Annan to investigate profiteering from the Oil for Food programme, was obliged to look into the matter. Despite the incontestable fact that Annan had met with Cotecna ...”

“... Institute of Economic Affairs was set up in the mid-1950s, its co-directors were a Conservative, Ralph Harris, and a Liberal, Arthur Seldon, who preached their gospel to both parties, indeed to anybody who would listen. The Orange Book liberalism of Clegg and Laws, which came as such a surprise to so many Liberal Democrat voters, but not until after they had ...”

“... to two such ventures: the Bedford estate, whose involvement in urban development ran from Inigo Jones’s highly innovative Covent Garden Piazza in the 1630s, via the creation of Bloomsbury’s Georgian delights, to the development of Figs Mead, a model lower-class suburb, in the 1830s; and the Foundling Hospital estate, to the east of Bloomsbury, developed ...”

“... as strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great ...”

“... sparseness of Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024), starring a scarred, desperate, mostly naked Ralph Fiennes, conflicted about his homecoming to a convincingly unhappy Juliet Binoche. Lacking the budget for gods or special effects, that film invited us to wonder what remains of The Odyssey and its hero when stripped down to the sinews and the hungry ...”

“... anecdotes (asked by a snobbish girl how he planned to spend the summer, the novelist James Jones replied, ‘I’m having my asshole sewed up to see if I can shit through my armpits’) and inane puns (apropos a prostitute: ‘one swallow does not a slummer make’). Worse are the gossipy reveries about former lovers delivered with a minty blend of ...”

“... us sample questions from past papers. Wondering how Wordsworth and his undergraduate friend Robert Jones managed to miss their way at the Simplon Pass, as recorded in The Prelude, he walks the route and explains the topography. Later, to elucidate the account of ascending Snowdon in Book xiii of the poem, he puts on his boots again and pants up the poet’s ...”

“... on Delaware was total. ‘General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it,’ Ralph Nader said. As Tim Murphy wrote last year in Mother Jones, ‘the state’s centre of gravity began to shift from the world of chemicals to the big business of other people’s business – banking, accounting, law and ...”

“... from when it first came out, the few minutes that I see the scene in which Durrance, played by Ralph Richardson, loses his pith helmet as he’s climbing a cliff in the desert. The helmet bounces away down onto the sand leaving him exposed to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John ...”

“... in fine detail about his depiction of Italian immigrants. There were certainly places where Ralph Ellison would be called out for Invisible Man’s representation of the Negro and for his views on the race question. But at Yeshiva University Philip Roth was always going to be the main dish. By accepting a Jewish university’s invitation, di Donato and ...”