“... warmly disapproves; and his reasons are political. As a matter of nomenclature, I suppose it is a nice question whether a poet is mistrusting Romanticism exactly when he seeks to resist the lure of the aesthetic: it depends entirely on whether we nominate as really (‘propositionally’) ‘Romantic’ the disposition to the aesthetic or the disposition to ...”

“... to Klain, ‘that there was no way to build a nationwide pluralistic democracy based in Kabul’. David Petraeus and other generals instead convinced Obama to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to pull out US troops and told an interviewer that he would feel ‘zero responsibility’ for what happened ...”

“... Typically, Johnson has recently tossed in yet another national body he has dreamed up to make a nice headline – the Joint Biosecurity Centre – which has further tangled the web, even before it has properly come into existence.One thing that’s clear is that, as part of the Lansley shake-up, responsibility for care homes was dumped on local ...”

“... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... fake jocular, know-your-place remarks of the sort made by Michael Fallon to Andrea Leadsom, or by David Davis of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected ...”

“... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...”

“... and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies’, David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno’s father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on ...”

“... their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like David Irving (Hitler’s War), who misuse history to advance their dangerous ideologies, and, at the other end of the scale, men like Martin Gray (For those I loved), who use these appalling events for self-aggrandisement. Interestingly, nobody minds much about ...”

“... his own. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, later published stories in the magazine and his son David would also find a path into the fiction section. Having secured a berth in the upper echelon of eminence, Updike never forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John ...”

“... be bought by people to be relet on short tenancies. You get to know people, they’re very nice, then all of a sudden they’re gone.’Kendall is a fisherman’s daughter, born in Milford Haven in 1929, who got her school leaver’s certificate and moved from Pembrokeshire to the eastern edge of London to stay with her aunt and look for work. There ...”

“... wanna be.’ (Bornstein’s memoir is called A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today.) One of the ways trans people challenge the popular image of human sexuality is by insisting, in the words of the writer and activist ...”

“... Beyond the Fringe. A process was set in motion which was to culminate in Jonathan Ross asking David Cameron whether he masturbated when he thought of Mrs Thatcher, and Little Ant and Little Dec asking Blair: ‘If you make an ugly smell, do people pretend not to notice because you is the prime minister?’ The coming series of election debates on TV ...”

“... He didn’t have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (‘Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs’), a few eclectic names ...”

“... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In ...”