“... world. ‘The dream of purity and freshness was born from the omnipresence of muck and dust,’ John Berger wrote in his essay ‘A Load of Shit’. ‘This polarity must be one of the deepest rooted in human imagination, intimately connected with the idea of home as a shelter – against many things, including dirt.’ For Walt Whitman, ‘this ...”

“... though ineffectual James Hamilton, earl of Arran, and the late James III’s francophone nephew John Stewart, duke of Albany. Albany was the most trustworthy and competent of this trio; Margaret had the sense in the long run to see that he best served the interests of her son the king. Meanwhile, after her divorce from Angus, Margaret provided some comic ...”

“... of clientage networks. From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the English Civil War did not arise out of a long-running constitutional dispute centred on the rise of Parliament. Parliaments (the plural is significant) served as points of contact between the centre and the counties and were largely ...”

“... a preferred policy tool has long been recognised, and even celebrated in fiction, for example in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), which featured an Israeli spymaster’s devious and successful plot to kill a Palestinian terrorist. One operation in particular caught the popular imagination: the hunting down of the perpetrators of the ...”

“... extraordinary ceiling mural depicting cavorting monkeys in 18th-century dress, executed c.1914 by John Alden Twachtman, who took inspiration from similar murals painted c.1730 by Christophe Huet at the Château de Chantilly, can now be admired. Elsewhere, architectural features – ranging from decorative marble and plasterwork to wood panelling and carvings ...”

“... King Arthur) to Æthelred (Æthelstan’s great-nephew), omitting Æthelstan entirely. When Eric John surveyed the tenth century for The Anglo-Saxons (1982), he focused on Edgar, Æthelstan’s nephew. Since then, attention has shifted to Alfred’s achievements, and those of his son Edward the Elder, with Michael Wood alone making the case for ...”

“... book, Crush, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror ...”

“... making speeches, supporting dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam against Governor-General Sir John Kerr (whom he describes as ‘a rorty farting old Falstaff’), declaring himself a Republican, and writing a play with strong social over-tones. But when the Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1973 he refused to go to Stockholm to receive it, and the ...”

“... it conveys is that to him that hath, it shall be given: not only Hintlesham Hall to live in, but John Cleese and Joanna Lumley for company, and a useful collection of cashmere sweaters to wear on the HTV series which spawned the book. We further learn that HTV’s ‘imaginative and courageous’ Patrick Dromgoole (a good director of avant-garde plays as an ...”

“... you regard poker as a matter of life or death?’ He replied: ‘Hell, no, cards is serious.’ John Stockley Pomeroy is a West Point graduate who has left the Army and put in some time in the Yukon. The period is the turn of the century. The new books are The Four Feathers and The Ambassadors. The first oilfield in Texas has just gushed, Orville and Wilbur ...”

“... specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie Foster in his drawer. ‘You can always ...”

“... of a civilisation that brought about discontent with life.’ In one of his more polemical moods, John Stuart Mill remarked that ‘there is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill, if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it.’ I see no reason why the editors of the Standard Edition should be held responsible for that ...”

“... Vaizey has no doubt at all. ‘They were the best.’ Hugh Gaitskell, Iain Macleod, Richard Titmuss, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle. They were all ‘clever, honest, admirable and honourable’. They were all, except Boyle, who was at school at the time, affected by the slump. They were all excited by the political changes and administrative advances of the war ...”

“... beautifully. ‘We live as we dream – alone.’ Conrad’s sombre aphorism earns its place too. John Updike, in a passage from Couples that Stephen Brook has also collected, looks at the situation from another angle, that of the excluded other person: ‘A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life [about catching ...”

“... as he had been when Jenkins took it in the first place. It is the facetiousness that annoys. Is John Pilger really so dreadful? Can the Stephen Waldorf affair be taken lightly? Does Johnson have to talk about Greenham women as if he were an agent of Lord Gnome? The British Library will catalogue him under ‘Anecdotes, facetiae, satire etc’ – which is ...”