“... of them to alter their middle-class character. It was the policy of the cuckoo in the nest. A small number of middle-class boys had first been allowed to share in the endowments made for the poor early in the 19th century. By the 1870s there was a powerful ‘reform’ movement pressing for the new type of school. Some of the hospitals, notably ...”

“... of chemical or biological weapons. 5. Iraq is a dictatorship in a class of its own, or a very small set that includes North Korea, for violation of human rights. 6. In consequence, Iraq cannot be accorded the rights of a sovereign state, but must submit to blockade, bombing and loss of territorial integrity, until the international community decides ...”

“... mother Bertha was a cultivated woman, who had acted in Yiddish theatre. She died when Chester was small, his father remarried, and the boy was largely brought up by his grandmother. His grandmother’s name was Bobby. His stepmother’s name was Syd. (In their choice of names the Americans have always been more eclectic than we are: a girl in Dynasty, for ...”

“... But the danger lies not so much within the population as a whole, where religious extremists are a small minority (more confessional votes are cast in Israel than Pakistan), as within the Army. Officers and other ranks who have worked with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Lashkar-i-Tayyaba in Kashmir have become infected with zealotry. At the same time ...”

“... monologues (Helen Baxendale as a servant girl, Joss Ackland as Barabbas) was also consigned to the small hours: ‘It was felt that because these dramas are considered, thoughtful pieces, they suit the later evening slots when the audience has time to sit and enjoy them.’ At the same time, paradoxically, the BBC’s public service remit seriously restricted ...”

“... gourmet inmate took delivery of new potatoes from a prison officer and finding them a touch too small, threw the lot in the officer’s face. In January 1994 the Home Secretary received a protest from a visitor to the prison, Lady Olga Maitland, about these shenanigans. ‘Lady Olga didn’t mention security,’ he observed. ‘She didn’t mention any of ...”

“... only to divide and reassemble in Capri or San Francisco the next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to look for the orphaned ones. If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to be ...”

“... political and social upheavals of a wholly unparalleled kind. It is on this theme that Stephen Blakemore focuses his attention. Burke and the Fall of Language concentrates on the writer who was more aware than anyone – other than his mortal enemy Rousseau – of the extent to which politics is not just described but actually constituted by the ...”

“... in the bath with baby Jesus; a man in a Windsor carving playing ‘horsey’ with a small child; and William the Marshal, handed over as a hostage by his father at the age of six and then subject to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who ...”

“... use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by ...”

“... to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott protégé who declared not long ago that if he was ever cut in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of ...”

“... in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, Loy decided to become a work of art. Her first marriage, to Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, was unhappy. The strain of Haweis’s numerous affairs and the death of their daughter, of meningitis, two days after her first birthday, led to their separation. However, when Loy became pregnant as a result ...”

“... Bucks County farm, doesn’t really take off. They collaborated once on a play called Even Stephen that was never produced, and talked of writing a novel together: nothing ever came of it. If anything, West rather deferred to Perelman in their literary relationship, submitting everything he wrote to his brother-in-law’s approval. Perelman moved to ...”

“... draws on, T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1967). For the contributors to that volume, among them Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, were all allowed to quote from Eliot’s correspondence. Compare Ackroyd with what Ackroyd was presumably not allowed to publish although it had previously been published (this being what I mean by ...”

“... no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings ... At its ...”