“... as to suggest that they are monsters while Matilda, who really is miraculous in that she has magic powers, fails to be recognised by her parents. Her mother, unaware that she was pregnant until very near the point of delivery, neither wanted a baby nor knew what to do with one; her father was expecting a boy (he persists in calling Matilda ‘boy’ till ...”

“... the Sidneys protected in Elizabeth’s reign, and whose revolutionary pamphlet ‘How superior powers ought to be obeyed’ seems to me to be echoed by Geron in the eclogues of Book Four of Arcadia. In editing Arcadia, Greville brought forward to Book One the Ister Bank poem – the fable of the beasts. There Sidney recounts the political philosophy he had ...”

“... production’. Whether Wilson expected the union leaders, whom he knew well, to bite is not clear. Michael Foot gave the rationale for killing off the idea when he rose in the Commons to say that the Left was not against an incomes policy – ‘indeed, we believe such a policy is essential to socialism’ – but that in this case the Government had ...”

“... themselves did not apply. In the years before Spitzer turned to the Martin Act, these draconian powers had mainly been used against small-time fraudsters. There was, Thompson said, ‘an unspoken gentleman’s agreement’ that it shouldn’t be used against major financial institutions. Dark pools were originally set up in the US in the late 1980s as an ...”

“... confrontations between one European citizenry and another) and beef up the European Commission’s powers to control the budgets of EU member states. The idea that ‘market forces’ would bring about convergence within the Eurozone has effectively been abandoned. In its place is a strange mixture of French and German ideas about how Europe – and states in ...”

“... novels have survived, thanks to the efforts of such admirers as J.B. Priestley, Doris Lessing and Michael Holroyd, and to the biographical enterprise set in train by his older brother, Bruce, whose memoir of Patrick, The Light Went Out (1972), prompted the first Hamilton mini-revival. Bruce was upfront about his brother’s drinking: his book is the source of ...”

“... by a truck. Much has been written about Biden as ‘America’s mourner’, given preternatural powers of empathy by the loss of his wife, his daughter and then, in 2015, his son Beau, from brain cancer. ‘The sensation I had,’ Biden wrote, ‘was best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my ...”

“... like a mug’s game at the best of times, with all those writers perpetually at the peak of their powers, but there’s a special reason for the whistling-in-the-dark tone of the cover copy for Neel Mukherjee’s fourth novel, Choice – ‘breathtaking and devastating’ it says, as a placeholder, on the proof, though the finished version settles on ‘a ...”

“... cast off for Istanbul. Robin made his way south through Bulgaria, which was about to join the Axis powers, and in a matter of days he and Micheline were reunited.Inever saw​ Granny Helen smoke, though I do know that during the war she carried a full cigarette case, as a strategy. I remember only in outline the story my father told me of these cigarettes, the ...”

“... of what the EU had become. Once the campaign began, two of his leading cabinet ministers – Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since ...”

“... Two events of the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common ...”

“... within the clan compound, is to cast lucozade away for wine, so enormously superior are Cao’s powers of female characterisation to the vapid surrogates of Proust’s imaginary. In The Dream, where flowers have a more pregnant metaphorical force, comedy and tragedy are of equal access. What doesn’t travel, at least beyond East Asia, is the escape hatch ...”

“... which to oversee executive discretion, a task that the courts here already have well in hand, as Michael Howard and other ministers would be the first angrily to testify. This is not the prize that most advocates of the Convention are after. What excites them is the notion that after incorporation the judiciary would be able to strike down Parliamentary ...”

“... 1848. This revolutionary document tried to counter the effects of industrialisation by providing powers to construct decent water supply and sewerage systems, which in turn led to an important decline in infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid. That milestone was followed by the Royal Sanitary Commission of 1869-71, and two further Public Health Acts ...”

“... a favourite conceit of conservatives. Before he became attorney general in Bush’s second term, Michael Mukasey informed civil libertarians that they, and not those who illegally tortured prisoners of war, were going to have blood on their hands. The offence of the liberals, he claimed bizarrely in the Wall Street Journal, was to advocate judicial oversight ...”