“... might be, he would accuse her of being ‘too Frenchy’.) In her three years at the White House, she led a major renovation, and in a televised tour of the improvements combined a geeky knowledge of Lincoln and Jefferson with an antique dealer’s fastidiousness about the dating of chairs. She also did a shorter version of the tour in ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... it, you might find that the work of these painters has, if not rigour, its own sort of integrity. Richard Morphet’s catalogue essay speaks with a fine generosity about the slow, steady, affirmative qualities of their later painting. This sort of pleading won’t settle the issue, however. The exhibition in question was just too big: ‘pleasure’, whatever ...”

“... to know why the inhabitants of a dying town could only discuss their problems in a cloud of smoke. Richard Klein, Professor of French at Cornell, could supply Mrs Willis with a number of answers, one of them being that, in wartime, smoking keeps up ‘courage and endurance in the face of intolerably stressful circumstances’, not only because of its ...”

“... to a French princess, with its rhetoric of historical effacement; on the other, the scene of Richard III’s nightmares at Bosworth, in which the past erupts to confound its own erasure. For Mullaney it is Talbot, the betrayed martial hero of Henry VI Part I, who stands for what is systematically forgotten in the remainder of the cycle: his, after ...”

“... via the (mild) heresies of Hicks, James Meade and Roy Harrod rather than via the true belief of Richard Kahn or Joan Robinson. In any event, Keynes made no further important theoretical contribution to economics. The running was left to others. For Skidelsky, however, this is an unreal problem since the third volume is dominated by what he sees as the ...”

“... alliances, Fit an apartment for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady; And for your death which will be mine prepare An encasement as if of solid blood.Whether or not such buildings and monuments end up being commissioned and built, the speaker is able to present his identity and art as ...”

“... Grandma Lu, her father’s mother, and she doesn’t need to be blamed outright to feel punished.Richard Beard’s extraordinary memoir of 2017, The Day That Went Missing, has the same starting point, a brother drowning, apparently within reach of a sibling unable to help. Richard was eleven in 1978, Nicky nine. They were ...”

“... Communion Table. His fever-stricken and apparently demented curate, Forsythe, has even stuffed a white bird, approximating to a dove, which is to be hung above the altar to represent the Holy Ghost in flight; moreover, he has obliged their dog to fast during Lent. This latter is a nice stroke of humour, since all dogs in India live on the edge of ...”

“... solving these problems, above all the Palestinian problem. The globalists, on the other hand, like Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig, looked at the Middle East as just one arena in their global fight against the Soviet Union. For them Israel was not part of the problem, but part of the solution. The State Department, where George ...”

“... there was, by all accounts, a certain degree of excitement. The Lost City consisted of a field of white towers: hydrothermal vents, populated by tiny see-through creatures. So did this mean that Plato had been on to something? Was this yet another example of a myth becoming reality, or at least a myth with a core, a kernel, a germ, a grain of truth? Let’s ...”

“... service was the Vanguard in December 1994. It was designed to last 25 years; in the 2006 defence White Paper this was extended by five years. Any replacement would be expected to enter service by 2025. If it were decided that three submarines would do, the first replacement would be needed by 2026. Let’s assume it would take ten years to build a submarine ...”

“... How does​ Shakespeare look, after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter? Scenes of sexual coercion, from Richard III to Pericles, have become more immediate. In Measure for Measure, Isabella’s predicament – should she agree to sleep with Angelo, corrupt deputy to the Duke of Vienna, in order to save her brother from execution? – gets audiences on her side ...”

“... political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to be. The shift in the politics of Russia which followed the December elections is very marked; it is also, as usual, murky. On one level, the result ...”

“... popworld of Beavis and Butthead and the fortysomething editors who deify Rosanne Arnold and Richard Nixon on the same page. Editors once made yearly scouting trips up to the North Country, just to avoid getting sucked into the black hole of fad and revisionism. These trips, which took place in the spring and always in a four-wheel-drive ...”