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“... cultivated by Lady Morgan – as for Scotchness. Jane Austen was impressed by neither Glorvina nor Robert Burns, championing instead that model of quiet English moral sobriety Fanny Price. Brigid Brophy’s funniest piece is on fish, that silent persecuted majority, whom even hostesses who are delighted to provide a vegetarian meal (‘Oh, by the way, you do ...”

“... give scope for intelligence, but it could also advance the hesitating and time-serving nitwit Robert Craigie to high judicial office. There is the even more lamentable career of Tweeddale as Secretary of State, a post which presumably had some relation to the fact that his son-in-law was prime minister, and which had a lot to do with the initial success ...”

“... Jebb, was being received into the Catholic Church, Belloc, at a particularly solemn moment in the service, ‘leaned forward to Father Vincent McNabb, who was conducting the ceremony, and said, in a loud voice: “Excuse me, father, is there a telephone in the sacristy?” ’ And again: ‘At the great Requiem which was offered for Chesterton’s soul in ...”

“... plotting: since the crime has already been committed (the abduction of Owen Kane, the killing of Robert, the RUC officer), the narratives are internalised – rueful accounts of the lives of good but guilty men. The action is economical, the characters entirely engaging: both novels were made into successful films, full of psychological insights, unravelling ...”

“... by the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray and nearly everything that he could find associated with Robert Louis Stevenson. He also had a number of trophy items like Shakespeare’s First Folio (though copies of the Folio were not so hard to find: his contemporary Henry Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare ...”

“... their original names – a death sentence.* Meanwhile the justice secretary feels he must pay lip-service to her status in all of this. In 1993, there was no liberal orthodoxy to apply to the case, and there isn’t now. Yet we should still think about Boy A and Boy B, who only became known to us as Robert Thompson and Jon ...”

“... The reticence of Riding seems to inform Other Traditions. These lectures perform an invaluable service, in that they create a new context for the reconsideration of neglected poets. Ashbery offers thumbnail biographies of each poet while focusing on the way in which the poems themselves lead their own life. With the exception of Clare, little of the work ...”

“... statism. Through it, he argues, ‘conservatives enshrined human rights as European values in the service of a nostalgic Christian vision of the European legal order, not a liberal cosmopolitan one.’ So if to modern readers the European convention, which includes practically no social or collective rights, looks like a 19th-century manifesto of liberal ...”

“... left. Best supporting actress, Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big ...”

“... Oradea in Romania) but the First World War disrupted his studies and after reluctant service in the Imperial Army he settled alongside thousands of other displaced Ostjuden in the neighbourhood of Leopoldstadt in Vienna, where my grandfather was born. In 1939, the family escaped to London, where my mother was born in 1947. Around a century after ...”

“... Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the Government. His tough talk sounded like saloon-bar bragging until, to the astonishment of all who knew him, Routledge brought down Mandelson. But the minister’s resignation was a ...”

“... did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the ...”

“... financial system itself. The EU claims it runs a ‘fully autonomous sanctions regime’ in the service of ‘safeguarding EU values’. But for the most part its sanctions, and those of the UK, are applied in conjunction with US power. The structure of international finance means that even the largest banks can’t afford to provoke American ire.Iran is ...”

“... the crowd as ‘fellow citizens’ and maintained calmly that, after a lifetime of loyal military service to his country, he was being executed for a crime of which ‘I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty than any of you who may now be hearing me.’ Cautioned by the sheriff, he signed off with the hope that ‘the principles of freedom, of humanity ...”

“... in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church in the afternoon is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and unexpectedly rounded off by Ben, her middle son, who despite grief and nerves manages to say what his mother had meant to him and his two ...”