“... Puritan attitude to the family. Moreover, he is led into caricaturing the approach of Kathleen Davies, the author of a pioneering article on the alleged novelty of Puritan attitudes, who ‘seems to think there is nothing new under the sun,’ since she has found similar attitudes in 14th-century writers. Collinson’s attempt to dismiss ...”

“... to meritocratic independence – indeed, it was often alleged, to outright republicanism. As Michael Franklin suggests in his excellent biography, Jones must have relished upending the patron-client hierarchy when he got Althorp elected to Samuel Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club, where Jones had mingled with Burke and Gibbon before even Boswell was ...”

“... then had become, and was to remain for many years, his creed. Interestingly, this poem for Russell Davies, written while filming with Barry Humphries in Cardiff, is couched in rhyme royal, a stanza which is a Manx-cat version of ottava rima, though it may well predate it, having been used by Chaucer. Auden also decided on rhyme royal for ‘Letter to Lord ...”

“... amount of Personal Protective Equipment available for staff and the supply of ventilators. Sally Davies, then the chief medical officer for England, made one of the few public references to the exercise in a speech that year, highlighting the NHS’s inability to ‘cope with the excess bodies’, and warning of the enormous social and economic impact of a ...”

“... I can’t say he’s reasonable,’ a colleague remarked of Stanley Kubrick, ‘I can only say he’s obsessive in the best sense of the word.’ Because he was obsessive without being crazy, many people have thought Kubrick was a genius, but the word is chiefly a gesture of admiring incomprehension. What Kubrick’s films suggest is that he was some kind of meticulous master, but a master of the obvious, and anyone who is surprised by the ponderousness of his new work, Eyes Wide Shut, must have forgotten what the other films were like ...”

“... a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard Pennington. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies did take the part of Etain in Rutland Boughton’s opera, The Immortal Hour in 1922, with Peter Shelving’s designs, and since she also acted in a play called Spring Tide which opened at the Duchess Theatre on 15 July 1936, we may safely bet that this ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Augustus John, Elisabeth Lutyens, John Lehmann, Louis Macneice, Alan Rawsthorne, Michael Ayrton. In the dark background are the diabolic Bernard Van Dieren and Philip Heseltine (‘Peter Warlock’), two men, composer-writers like himself, to whom Lambert maintained a fierce loyalty, before and after their deaths. Lambert’s cardinal ...”

“... commentators sought to demonstrate the savage character of the Irish. According to Sir John Davies, the attorney general for Ireland under James I, these people were ‘little better than cannibals, who do hunt one another; and he that hath most strength and swiftness, doth eat and devour all his fellows.’ ...”

“... tenacious efforts by Watson, his fellow Labour MP Chris Bryant and the Guardian reporter Nick Davies to show that Mulcaire and Goodman were fall-guys. The Press Complaints Commission meanwhile proved it was dysfunctional by devoting an entire report in November 2009 to a sardonic dismissal of Davies’s painstaking ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”

“... development dictated by a wellintentioned succession of improvers from Spenser and Sir John Davies, through the Enlightenment administrators, to liberal Tories, or Gladstone and Asquith. It may be unfair to suggest that Johnson believes that the Irish always needed to be taught (though this is how the period of ‘Celtic disorder’ is portrayed), but ...”

“... It’s what was promised in return that one wonders about. But we have glimpses. When Gavyn Davies submitted a report on the future of broadcasting in 1999, it had various anti-Murdoch provisions and recommendations, none of which made it into law. When the House of Lords added an amendment to a communications Bill, threatening to ban ‘predatory ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... in movements of this kind: precipitation, bonding and legitimation, functions emphasised by C.S.L. Davies and by S.M. Harrison in his account of the supposedly religionless rising in the Lake Counties. To restrict ‘religion’ in the 16th century to matters ‘spiritual’ and to ‘Catholic idealism’, even to exclude the preservation of monasteries as a ...”

“... stretches from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan. Unlike them, however, he is little known in Britain. Michael Hamburger’s translations established Hölderlin and Celan in English, but he was less fortunate with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s ...”