“... calm of mind all passion spent’ – l is dominant, and this allows, subliminally, for a hope that in the future a voice might again say ‘Let there be light.’ Also in the last line of Paradise Lost – ‘Through Eden took their solitary way’ – the consonant Milton prized above all others, the l in the centre of his name, stands out. The ...”

“... This is surely the plain biographical truth, well stated. But if both the emergency and the hope that brought him into the Communist movement were more intense than was typical of his English contemporaries, it is less clear that the chronological contrast would have been more significant than the geographical, as he goes on to suggest. Was the October ...”

“... Britain returned most of its gains to the Netherlands in exchange for keeping the Cape of Good Hope and some minor territories in Latin America. In 1817, his glory days seemingly over, Raffles became the lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, a miserable penal colony and pepper trading post on the west coast of Sumatra. Back in London, he had moved in the ...”

“... he composed in ‘a naive fashion’, Messiaen replied: ‘Please don’t take it as an insult. I hope I am also naive and will remain so as long as I live.’)Messiaen’s​ impact on the European avant-garde of the postwar years was so profound that Grisey called him ‘God the Father’. Yet he left behind no ‘school’ of composition and was nearly as ...”

“... letters would enshrine his reputation; an edition of those was released in 2008, edited by Christopher Reid. I am not sure this enshrinement has come to pass. His reputation still rests on the phrase ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, and Birthday Letters, read at a distance of 27 years, contains too much careful positioning to really count as ...”

“... Hague, Duncan Smith and Howard – who were sworn opponents of Maastricht, none with any hope of winning an election. In government, Blair’s initial doubts about the single currency, prompted by the hostility to the euro of the Murdoch press that had helped elect him, soon faded. But Gordon Brown’s firm refusal to abandon sterling, made from his ...”

“... dimmed by the circumstances of his incarceration. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t look in hope for the places where creative survival might be found. It’s just that I doubt this gets us closer to the man himself.Some of the writing on the drawings is, as Adamson put it, esoteric. One drawing, done in the art studio on a large sheet of paper (and ...”

“... of the art world’, the letter was signed by Marina Warner, Michael Craig-Martin, Christopher Frayling and George Melly, also several artists and dealers, and as with all round-robins it wasn’t perhaps the letter any one of them would have written individually. Still, as a tactic, it showed blessed unworldliness, as surprising as it is ...”

“... world and constantly execrated but never actually discussed. An exception is a little speech by St Christopher, the AA name of one of the alcoholics put in charge of Mungo, who makes a link with the upper classes, not an unusual suggestion in itself, but the angle is new:Well, they’re aw at it. It’s what us boys do when we’re alone. A bit of ...”

“... against Forth Valley Health Board, but that hadn’t happened either. The best the families could hope for, they were told, was a Crown Censure – effectively a ticking off.The Allans began to gather their own data. Alone at first, and then in collaboration with researchers at Glasgow University, they trawled through the records of hundreds of ...”

“... blindly to power and authority’.This will not do. They were ‘ordinary men’ – the title of Christopher Browning’s indispensable book – who shot, day after day, at close range, men, women and children by the hundreds of thousands. The social psychology of the past three decades seems to belie the notion that a deviant personality is necessary to ...”

“... one so far – well over two million words, and much more to come. Counsel assisting the Inquiry, Christopher Clarke QC, acting as a kind of master of ceremonies, opened the proceedings by saying that everyone present had read my various witness statements (and, later, Derek Humphry’s) and that he and other counsel representing interested parties had some ...”

“... table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by London extras, a notoriously difficult, unco-operative ...”

“... when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for ...”

“... to be a family. Marten weighed the certainty that her baby would be taken into care against her hope that they might somehow find a way to stay together. Once that decision had been made, rationality, the capacity to compare one set of possible outcomes to another, disappeared. They behaved like people in the grip of a desperate compulsion. This must have ...”