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“... a saintly, extravagantly learned Byzantinist who was on the fringe of my family circle (the best friend of a cousin by marriage), and Nicholas Riasanovsky, a Russian historian. We were to give out money for graduate research projects. I couldn’t call Alexander ‘Onkel Paul’, as I might otherwise have ...”

“... terms. ‘There is no plan by the university to break any trusts,’ Davies and the dean of SAS, Nicholas Mann, stated in 2007. This sounded reassuring, but it emerged in the recent court proceedings that no one in the university bothered to show the trust deed even to their in-house legal adviser until the summer of 2008. Up to that time the university had ...”

“... denounced his own father?) One could also question Slezkine’s premise. The émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in his book The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (1946) noted with approval a process of routinisation in the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, Trotsky had observed the same process, which he called ‘The Great ...”

“... her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have covers featuring Boty with one of her best-known paintings, With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962). On the Gazelli book she sits below it, wearing a high-necked dress and looking down coyly at the cat on her lap. On Kristal’s she is in front of it, staring straight out, naked. Boty saw parallels ...”

“... on both sides and open to the whole city. The Vatican Library, founded at the same time by Pope Nicholas V, occupied a set of four rooms, each with its own purpose. It too was open, if not to the public, at least to all members of the papal curia. And it too was a secular, humanistic collection inside an ecclesiastical institution. It soon became an ...”

“... obscured the instruction of the text. There are a number of ways of approaching this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and ...”

“... Gandhi called the offer a ‘postdated cheque drawn on a crashing bank’ – but Orwell did his best to soften the truth. In his broadcast news commentary, he conceded the failure but added that reports from across the world showed that only supporters of fascism were pleased by it. According to the BBC broadcast, the claim made by Axis broadcasters that ...”

“... to the trade unions, and her famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ But as Nicholas Timmins has pointed out in The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (1995), by the end of her period of office a prime minister whose instincts were ‘to unscramble the NHS and to increase charges, to roll back social security and social ...”

“... conclusion that it would be dangerously irresponsible not to attempt to slow global warming. How best to do this has been a debate largely dominated so far by economists, such as Nicholas Stern, the author of last year’s Treasury study. Economists tend to be sceptical about both voluntary restraint and the capacity of ...”

“... Emily Hale, the old flame with whom Eliot visited Burnt Norton, Andrew Eliot, Sir Thomas Elyot, or Nicholas Ferrar who in 1626 established the religious community at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire; but these names are suppressed within the poems, ghosting them. The insistent names are place names. The people, like the dancers of ‘East Coker’, have been ...”

“... to the exalted nature of his literary ambitions. Regrettably, not even in what seem to me the best of his novels – The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956) and Herzog (1964) – is there any achieved realisation of ‘the idea of greatness’ as a condition of mind. And in much of the work thereafter, including Mr Sammler’s Planet ...”

“... grew up, Lucretia Jones’s small daughter dutifully replied (as she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually ...”

“... their way. There was an election coming within 18 months and if she lost it they might spend the best years of their political lives in opposition. Meanwhile, if Heseltine won, many of them would be out in the cold anyway. ‘The elders of the tribe, and most of its leading younger members too, wanted a quiet life and their own collective advancement. They ...”

“... insanely generous the next, passionately Catholic and, above all, convinced that he lived in the best of all possible worlds – Sarmatia Felix, the land of Golden Freedom. Bewildered readers may remember the way the Mitford sisters described their ‘Farve’, Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s books. Here was a real English Sarmatian: a ferocious backwoods ...”

“... From Gloucester Out. In other words, poets published poets, signalling their affinities the best way, through production, while continuing to strengthen transatlantic traffic, through readings, academic exchanges, hospitality. Distribution was nicely random, with many of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to ...”