“... affection’ for the Bourbon monarchy: he later confessed to weeping at the sight of Charles X being forced out of Versailles. But professional ambition led him to swear an oath of allegiance to the new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. When asked to choose a side, Tocqueville, not for the last time, preferred to maintain an ...”

“... after many years of not seeing him, catches sight of Bagshaw on a railway platform, ‘suggested hope to avoid recognition, while a not absolutely respectable undertaking was accomplished.’ There are two stories about how he came by his nickname. In one, Bagshaw is drunk, and, seeking to verify a quotation from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, pulls over a ...”

“... after students and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on ...”

“... The touchiness of other people disturbed Heaney and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... always ironised. We are always left out, especially when we seem to be included. ‘There is hope,’ Kafka wrote, ‘but not for us.’ Since the essential thing is there but not for us it is in a sense not really there – much as an Olympic victory isn’t there for a swimmer, because once the swimmer couldn’t swim and therefore can’t have won at ...”

“... of evidence suggests a strong presumption of Berlioz’s mendacity. Boschot was friendly with Charles Malherbe, chief editor of the (nearly) Complete Edition of Berlioz’s music published by Breitkopf and Härtel (1900-1910), which, revealing a similar distrust of what the composer wrote, standardised instrumentation, dynamics and phrasing according to ...”

“... VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to England, executed (by strangling before his body was burned) in October 1536. Daniell, like his hero, is an ...”

“... that in certain quarters lasted until the Blitz. Fifty years later it was revived by Prince Charles in his 1987 ‘Luftwaffe’ speech at Mansion House. Frank Lloyd Wright was a 19th-century man, with an uncomplicated belief in progress. He was born before Imperial Germany existed, at a time when the Emperor Napoleon III was securely on the throne of ...”

“... dust-jacket to Forty Stories mentions Pynchon and Beckett, but this is the world of Thurber and Charles Addams. Barthelme’s more serious intentions were made clear from the start. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (a story not to be found here but in his first book Come back, Dr Caligari) three protestors picket a New York church, in order to ...”

“... under the US system. I only think he is too confident of having demonstrated this. In reply to Charles Beitz’s criticism of the purely procedural interpretation of equal respect as implausibly narrow, he says: It is because we disagree about what counts as a substantively respectful outcome that we need a decision-procedure; in this context, folding ...”

“... vices: an attachment to the idea that ‘logic is the essence of philosophy’ and thus to the hope that results within logic are going to have decisive philosophical importance. He makes much play with the Loewenheim-Skolem theorem – ‘a satisfiable first-order theory (in a countable language) has a countable model’ – as if this somehow underwrote ...”

“... afflictions: her brother’s epilepsy, the death by drowning of a sister, like Browning’s Evelyn Hope ‘sixteen years old when she died’. Life and literature became inextricably tangled for the young girl in a quiet province. Frame is skilled at describing the almost tactile presence of words for the child and adolescent: the physical shock when she ...”

“... the actor who played Pete Dean in EastEnders was living with a woman who had once dated Prince Charles. The most interesting aspect of Tunstall’s survey, indeed, is the attention he draws to the relationship with television as the biggest single shift in newspaper culture since he conducted a similar study in 1968, just before Rupert Murdoch’s arrival ...”

“... who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment held out as little hope of salvation as saying one’s prayers at home and never going to church. The ritual and the socialising, along with the change of climate and scenery, were part of the cure, if not all of it, as even the doctors sometimes admitted. For about twenty years ...”