“... Evidently, things have not greatly changed in the last two hundred years. No existing country, John Dunn suggests, manages ‘to combine prudent regard for the economic limits to modern politics with delicate and effective concern for the sorts of human beings whom its economic momentum fashions’. Professor Dunn, who contributes the introduction and both ...”

“... which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in Toledo – could be regarded as a practical way of encouraging solidarity, and perhaps it took no longer to complete than it took for the alliance to ...”

“... silence was eloquent … It was likely that during the two years in Steep the ‘shambly’ Bacon took stock, recasting himself as the powerful figure the world has come to know.On the other hand, it’s just as likely that nothing at all happened. Bacon was not actually alone. He was accompanied, as always, by his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. His lover Eric ...”

“... The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we ...”

“... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... postwar vitality. The Whitechapel Art Gallery became a major venue after Bryan Robertson took over there, and the British Council, founded in 1934, also held important exhibitions, though it operated mostly abroad, becoming, as Garlake observes, an unacknowledged arm of the Foreign Office. Garlake quotes a letter, first brought to light in Frances ...”

“... who could show they had recently published a paper in a scientific journal. The restaurant took the journal’s ‘impact factor’ – a statistic based on the average number of citations received by papers carried in the journal in the two years after publication – and converted it into a cash equivalent, to be deducted from the bill.The impact ...”

“... It is easy to see this happening in RLT. In a recent anthology of feminist criticism, two critics took opposing positions on the relevance of the author’s intention to interpretation of a text. One argued that reliance on the author’s intent was inherently a male position, since this was an appeal to patriarchal authority, while another ...”

“... to her release from prison, where she was serving a mandatory life sentence. The Anderson ruling took away from the Home Secretary the power to make the ultimate decision as to how long a mandatory life prisoner should serve; instead, it became one for the courts and the parole board. It was this judgment, based on the provisions of the Human Rights Act ...”

“... reference, not that exclusive to the imagination of the writer, or his surrogates in the text. It took time for this extreme subjectivism to sink in among Robbe-Grillet’s readers, who, to the contrary, often found him too much of a chosiste, or a writer overinclined to dwell for reasons that weren’t apparent on physical objects undeserving of this ...”

“... material worked well for Caesar, but not always for his bumptious collaborators, some of whom took out an ad in Variety to vent about Caesar’s vaunted improvisational genius. ‘You mean the show is not AD LIB?’ ‘No, it’s written by MEL TOLKIN LUCILLE KALLEN MEL BROOKS.’ Over the years, the rowdy writers’ room also included ...”

“... Central Committee. Because the letter emphasised the seniority of his position in the PCI Gramsci took it very badly. At best it was, he thought, an idiotic and irresponsible mistake; at worst a deliberate plot to keep him in prison for as long as possible. The latter hypothesis is almost certainly absurd. Recent evidence points to the constant efforts of the ...”

“... by me upon the waters’ – to lead the elect by degrees into the mystery of things. Eliot took up the same theme in his 1937 Edinburgh University lectures on ‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’. There he described the characters in the final plays as ‘the work of a writer who has finally seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual ...”