“... the ‘complaint’ tradition that blossomed in the 18th century with the prescriptive grammars of Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray, primers that remained influential right up to Fowler’s day. True, Fowler is concerned to distinguish right from wrong usage, by making his cases negatively, displaying and correcting the wrong. But The King’s English provided ...”

“... vulgarity of Browning’; meets Walter de la Mare but records, ‘we had little to say’; judges Robert Graves to be an Ass; declares it ‘possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity’; refers to ‘greasy Epstein’, and to his admirer W.H. Auden as belonging (mysteriously) with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John ...”

“... Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a book with the same title, For Love of Country, Maurizio Viroli offers further, more sustained reflections on ...”

“... In Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) remarks that Las Vegas is about ‘selling people dreams for cash’ and, in a memorable elaboration of this cliché, that ‘it does for us what Lourdes does for hunchbacks and cripples.’ Much the same has been said about the culture of cinema, and how Scorsese’s film stands in relation to its subject is an interesting question ...”

“... I have to confess that before starting on this review I hadn’t read Robert Brandom’s massive Making It Explicit (1994). Although it’s famous, very few of my colleagues have read it either (I mean read it, not just bought it or dipped their toes in it). Writing such a walrus of a book is a risky business. Life is short and it’s publish or perish; so a lot is written and little is read ...”

“... what it looks like, but the painting makes the imagined Breughel that is the object of pursuit in Michael Frayn’s Headlong seem too obviously an invention, and Goodwin’s portrait of Mehmet an outright sham. There are, however, too many moments when you have to reach for the word ‘inevitably’ as you describe Lowry’s plot. Inevitably, there is a rival ...”

“... taught at UC San Diego alongside Rae Armantrout) or others in her generational cohort, like Michael Palmer or her sister Susan Howe. But one senses that the intention is different. She never rejected first-person experience as a basis of her lyrics; Robert Lowell’s Notebook poems were an early influence (‘When ...”

“... later. (A hazy episode from the 1972 campaign involves Frank Sheeran, the hitman portrayed by Robert De Niro in The Irishman, allegedly organising a truck drivers’ strike on behalf of the Bidens, preventing the delivery of a newspaper carrying ads for Joe’s opponent.) Schreckinger conveys an impression of Jim as a man who never developed much ...”

“... cowering in their consulting-rooms, and better certainly than any political scientist. Take Robert McKenzie, the television psephologist and master of the swingometer, a figure well-known in the Sixties, but now safely dead – and, as we shall see, without heirs who might want to sue on his behalf. A TV producer once had the idea of filming Abse and ...”

“... than a dozen numbers) is next to Tony Blair (home number only) and the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg (who also lived on Tom Wolfe’s street). There are lots of British socialites (brought to him by his friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of the late newspaper magnate and pensions-thief ...”

“... to the high point it enjoyed during the Second World War, first under Frank Owen and then under Michael Foot. Editing the Evening Standard was a much tougher task for Wintour than for his more recent successors, since the Rothermere Evening News was still in his time outselling its rival in the London market by roughly half a million copies every ...”

“... radical enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore. Recall Robert Bork’s infamous lament in Slouching towards Gomorrah (1996): The entertainment industry is not forcing depravity on an unwilling American public. The demand for decadence is there. That fact does not excuse those who sell such degraded material any more ...”

“... and forty years later, Nicholas’s grandson and namesake became a singing boy in the household of Robert Cecil, where he learned the lute and viol. The first of young Lanier’s (for want of a better term) diplomatic missions came in 1611, when Cecil sent him to Venice. Musicians and artists were often used as couriers and spies, and Lanier had the advantage ...”

“... Dáil Éireann was proscribed in September 1919. In the subsequent guerrilla warfare of 1919-21 Michael Collins, the Minister for Finance and Director of Intelligence of the Volunteers or Irish Republican Army, rose to prominence. In 1920 Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern ...”

“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”