“... strongly and unambiguously as possible”,’ or that the attorney general had retained Christopher Greenwood, a professor of international law at the LSE, ‘for the purpose of assisting in the development of legal arguments in support of the view that there was a sound legal basis for the use of force without a second resolution’. Finally, when ...”

“... trousers and a battered hat with a brim that hid her face’; the visiting Bertrand Russell; Christopher Isherwood; and Huxley’s favourite mystic, Krishnamurti, accompanied by a retinue of Theosophists and vegetarian catering ladies in saris. While his guests looked like pixies ‘on a spree’, according to Loos, Huxley himself resembled a ‘giant ...”

“... that that is what they are. Ideology means Marxism (and especially that ‘erring colleague’, Christopher Hill), but Elton reserves some of his ammunition for the alternative, liberal determinists, Arnold Toynbee, Sir John Plumb, J.H. Hexter, while not forgetting that morally admirable but woefully misled and misleading Christian Socialist ...”

“... presaging lunch at Marshall and Snelgrove’s and tea at Fortnum’s’. Instead ‘girls with white faces and heavily kohled eyes hurried out towards Praed Street’ – the book is best read with a streetfinder close to hand – ‘as if hastening to appointments with abortionists in seedy consulting rooms behind the Edgware Road’. Alas, times have ...”

“... entreated to play ‘Rule Britannia’. And when, his moralising over, he dusts his fingers on a white napkin after handing back Yorick’s skull to the gravedigger, an inspired prankster yells out: ‘Wai-ter.’ Charles Baudelaire had, it might be argued, a more authentic claim to the inky cloak and cosmic melancholy of the troubled prince than any other ...”

“... image-theft. Once again, despite the day’s walk, I found myself unable to sleep that night. The Christopher is a coaching inn on the Eton side of the river. Behind its olde worlde façade a tarmac lane extends, lined with refurbed hutches full of swags, pelmets and throw cushions – all the luxury stuffing. Boy and dog slept, I pored over the maps worried ...”

“... occurred when Christian Bourguet described his meeting in late March 1980 with Jimmy Carter at the White House. Bourguet, a French lawyer with ties to the Iranians, acted as an intermediary between the US and Iran; he had come to Washington because, despite an arrangement worked out with the Panamanians to arrest the ex-Shah, the deposed ruler had left ...”

“... the moderation of Isaac Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the ...”

“... a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well attuned to Sylvia Plath’s intensities never quite managed to rise to Trakl; the ...”

“... of late Miller (or, more accurately, last two-thirds Miller) is provided by the British critic Christopher Bigsby. For Bigsby, Miller has ‘quite consciously experimented with form’, not just in the later plays but throughout his career. Writing about The Archbishop’s Ceiling of 1977 (in which a group of East European intellectuals spend an evening in ...”

“... The subject is that more limited thing, the Henrician Reformation, which some historians, notably Christopher Haigh, make a matter of politics not religion and detach from the Reformation. Bernard, without any prolegomena, or rather only 124 words, plunges straight into 72 pages on the ‘King’s Great Matter’, the divorce. The implication is ...”

“... When​ the conspiracy theorists, diehard Trumpers and (white) natalists gathered in London in May for the UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies ...”

“... population had changed, as rapid deindustrialisation and the decline of the docks decanted its white working class to Essex, leaving a poorer, more vulnerable and now disproportionally immigrant population to bear the costs of deprivation, crumbling services and the rise of the National Front. True, at the century’s end private development and university ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... here is his ambition to write a new kind of English poem with what he described in his poem to Christopher Isherwood as a ‘strict and adult pen’. Elaborating on this, in his introduction to The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes characterises the sought-after new art as follows: ‘Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be ...”