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“... society that George Tomlinson (a future Bishop of Gibraltar) and II of his friends at St John’s College, Cambridge founded in 1820 – occupies a distinctive niche in British social mythology. Or, rather, it occupies several niches, according to the taste of the mythologiser. In the eyes of many of its members, looking back in later years on the ...”

“... the hands and clothes – are more distinctly Lavaterian in inspiration. (Barbara Hardy and John Carey have illuminatingly anatomised the significance of clothes as an index of character in Dickens and Thackeray, without invoking physiognomy.) But the truth is that after the effective build-up in the background chapters which comprise half of his ...”

“... criticism of the old order: the real challenge is building the new one. If others, from Sir Keith Joseph downwards, will leave Professor Elton time to get on with his work, he should have another magnum opus up his sleeve. By contrast, Professor Trevor-Roper is not among those whom one expects to find, in V.H. Galbraith’s inimitable phrase, ‘trailing ...”

“... radical expectations. The first name on the title page was that of the out-of-town publisher Joseph Cottle of Bristol. It’s an odd fact that Cottle authors – the youthful Southey and Coleridge alone, together, or in conjunction with friends such as Lamb – account for most of the modern English poets lampooned for their radicalism in the ...”

“... were a mistake. (Didn’t he have one kind friend who could have whispered something tactful?) As John Updike has put it in a very thoughtful fashion commentary on the whole unfortunate business: Ike, for instance, dear Ike with his infallible instincts, would never have let himself be caught in lace stockings, even though he did have the legs for them. I ...”

“... The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length with a giant collar, but Dr Pozzi easily ...”

“... Server: ‘It is almost me.’ Again, when she read the script of The Barefoot Contessa, she told Joseph Mankiewicz: ‘I’m not an actress, but I think I understand this girl. She’s a lot like me.’ Gardner’s increasing identification with her screen performances is not a surprise. This was how the star factory worked. They called Gardner the ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”

“... is no evidence that Byrd acquired a downbeat reputation like that of his younger contemporary John Dowland, who showed at least some measure of humorous self-deprecation in writing an instrumental piece entitled Semper Dowland, semper dolens (‘Dat’s Dowland, always doomy’).4 On the contrary, Byrd seems to have been a welcome dinner guest among the ...”

“... the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the Liberal Nationals changed their name, confusingly, to the National Liberals, and ...”

“... V was painfully shy. Scarcely a peep was heard in public from the elderly Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, a notoriously austere and laconic figure. And the contrast is heightened in retrospect by the fact that virtually everything the Kaiser said, no matter how risible, was recorded and preserved for posterity. One consequence is that his reputation has been ...”

“... and started a great flood of work by others which has not ceased with his death. Along with John Rawls, he initiated the vastly influential tradition within analytic philosophy of substantive moral exploration of major public issues, bringing high standards of clarity, rational argument and lucid expression to questions that matter to many more people ...”

“... put more than a thousand individual fakes into circulation. It was forgery on an industrial scale.Joseph Hone’s hugely entertaining new account shows how this ‘Moriarty of the book world’ met his match in a duo of intrepid young book dealers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, whose investigation is ‘worthy of ...”

“... church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s – when John Donne, not yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent ...”

“... belligerent. Furthermore, Clark and his wife, Jane, were staying with an arch-rival of Barnes’s, Joseph Widener, who was, as Clark puts it in his memoirs, ‘a collector of the old style, so courteous as to be practically indistinguishable from his butler’. So the next morning they took the precaution of leaving Widener’s car a quarter of a mile from ...”