“... as ‘the genial observer of the social scene’ – sympathetic to the working classes like the Miller and the Reeve, mildly satirical of established religious figures like the Monk, Friar and Prioress, respectful of solid moral worth in the Parson and Plowman, but capable of extending a hand to mavericks like the Wife of Bath. As for the ...”

“... would be too emotionally extravagant to produce a man like Major. (There are photos of his father, Tom, looking like a cross between George Formby and Norman Wisdom, in the book.) What his parents did bequeath him, however, was a consuming interest in popular entertainment, which this lucid, erudite study distils to excellent effect. An impressive amount of ...”

“... left’? Until the birth of the English Stage Company, the post-war British theatre was, as Arthur Miller has said, ‘hermetically sealed off from life’ – and from the American theatre. When Look Back in Anger was produced Miller had written Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and All My ...”

“... poem about privacy, ‘The Garden’, which supplied Lowell’s stanza form. And it is present in Tom Moore’s ode ‘To the Flying-Fish’, which longs to ‘cast every lingering stain away’ and to climb to a ‘purer air’. ‘Let not my spirit’s flight be weak,’ pants Moore, known to the world as the poet of an amorous love. We discover that Lowell ...”

“... describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... politically conservative, defensively étatiste, it seemed in the Sixties to be everything Karl Miller claimed – and not all that far removed from the Scottish situation. Yet within a decade it was to provide proof that a reformist intelligentsia could create its own economic and political dynamic. Miller’s position ...”

“... book was the baby for which the literary world was setting the banquet table and beating the tom-toms. Feature articles on Bailey were fulsome, bestsellerdom was practically assured, and the first spate of reviews, apart from a few dissents that turned out to be prescient, went off like confetti cannons. ‘A stunning feat’ (Publishers Weekly). ‘What ...”

“... He purged the 1990s Gazprom chairman Rem Viakhirev and appointed his own former adviser Aleksei Miller to head the firm, with Dmitry Medvedev as chairman of the board.By the time Putin came to power it was already clear that the springtime of capitalist transformation promised by huckster management consultants would never arrive. Gazprom was now by far the ...”

“... the more vulnerable Brexiters will fall victim to the tactical voting urged by Tony Blair and Gina Miller (who brought the Article 50 case against the government), and that more Labour MPs will hang on than currently seems likely. Even then, the best one can hope for is that May’s majority is kept under fifty. Her real gamble is that she will be able to ...”

“... tired of ‘moral liberty’ and, unable to find Darrelhyde, runs towards the assistant keeper, Tom, with relief and joy. Tom, however, is armed and takes aim ‘with classic correctness’, remembering the ‘joy of sharing a manly pursuit with his father’. As Percy dies, he sees a vision of the Professor as a dazzling ...”

“... who saw White romantically as a wild animal kept safe ‘behind the suburban-zoo bars’. Henry Miller and Alfred Perles (who published some of White’s poems in their magazine the Booster) thought madness ‘a mysterious conundrum to be embraced as intellectually inspiring, an ennobling risk one ran in the creation of great art’ (Dunn’s words). White ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... alone as the partial contrast in the comparative clause:* I liked her better than I do.* Tom saw Betty more often than he will.But power there grows out of the symbol of an asterisk, the star-chamber symbol for ‘unacceptable’.Not but what there is a regular attempt to palliate the charge. It is a pity even to seem to be agreeing with Roy ...”

“... list of principles’. Fuller’s list is the most famous. Joseph Raz, John Finnis and Tom Bingham follow Fuller in proposing eight principles. Others have been more parsimonious: A.V. Dicey had three principles; John Rawls had four. Waldron pokes fun at this approach – ‘Robert Summers holds the record, I think, with eighteen rule-of-law ...”

“... in 1990 she wrote: ‘I think Tosca might be wasted on me as I am so fond of it, and Jonathan Miller is so silly. They encourage him to be silly.’ Fitzgerald believed that as a biographer she could get to know a subject as well as anyone she had actually met, ‘particularly if you have the letters’. In her case the letters are probably better for ...”