“... 14-liner Pushkin invented for Eugene Onegin. This last he adopts for his letter from Moscow to Michael Frayn. Here the subject curdles unpleasantly and James the Cold Warrior puts in an appearance. I am sorry to see him joining Bernard Levin in offering a thanksgiving for the bomb which has guaranteed four decades of peace in Europe. It’s true that any ...”

“... incidentally, infects the career of Augustus, who skilfully dressed his growing powers in language which evoked the forms and conventions of the Republic. The real history of the period is at best ambiguous. Shakespeare’s conception of the period inclines, it seems to me, to the interpretation that the Empire began with Augustus. We are ...”

“... at ‘government by consultation’, strengthening the country’s postwar prospects by the use of powers delegated from Westminster. He gave Scotland what he thought was good for it. There were lots of Plans. After the war, planners with more clout imposed UK-wide plans, including centralised nationalisation, on Scotland, and the Labour tradition of support ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... able to found there would be a need for one or more servants to carry out tasks as yet beyond the powers of his own children. The nuclear family and the servant class were systems in symbiosis. A point made by the earlier volume was the difference in household structure between Eastern Europe, where various types of complex household can be found, and the ...”

“... electrons orbiting a central nucleus – summons up both a theory of atomic structure and the powers of nuclear energy. The periodic table made visible ideas of the connection between atomic weight and the periodicity of chemical properties. Watson and Crick took one look at the first jerry-rigged workshop model of double-helical DNA and they saw how the ...”

“... don’t think that’s plausible.’ Senior American generals, including Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency between 2012 and 2014, had been warning the Obama administration for some time that allowing jihadis to topple Assad would have dire consequences.* Apparently hoping that this line had gained traction in ...”

“... vote. They did this in part by adapting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Michael Heilperin, a founding member of Mont Pelerin, wrote the ICC’s International Code to Protect Foreign Investments, which enshrined the ‘preferential’ standing of foreign investors over the host state. Neoliberals, in other words, deftly promoted the ...”

“... literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to consequence. ‘To me ...”

“... the names tend to be. Fielding’s Shamela makes Richardson’s Pamela a sham. The name Austin Powers suggests that his prototype James Bond is really just a crappy English car fitted with a turbocharger, while his enemy Dr Evil is, well, too silly even to discuss. The spoof fairy-tale romance The Princess Bride has a heroine who defies convention by being ...”

“... aforesaid Nicholas is charged, before us at Westminster on Saturday next after eight days of Saint Michael, to undergo and receive whatever our court should then and there happen to order concerning him in this behalf, and this in no wise omit, upon the peril that may befall, and have there this writ. Witness, Sir John Popham, at Westminster, the eleventh day ...”

“... in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... man wandering around a second-hand market is hardly that of a creative genius at the height of his powers. And Browning didn’t set to work immediately after his transcendent experience on the terrace of Casa Guidi. At Rome in the winter of 1860-61 he spent most of his time in the studio of his friend William Wetmore Story, modelling clay figures, too ...”

“... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...”