“... chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and leader of the Southern segregationist bloc, Richard Russell, to whom Vice President Lyndon Johnson was leaking news from National Security Council meetings. The defence secretary, Robert McNamara, who had initially advocated a moderate course, soon swung in line behind his uniformed colleagues, and gave ...”

“... be the strongest currency, because of their habits.’ Now who said that? Was it Professor Fritz Stern, with a streetwise perspective which made it worth flying him in from JFK? Was it Professor Gordon Craig, proving yet again that you can always tell a Harvard man but you can’t tell him much? Was it the measured judgment of Lord Dacre? Was it an impish ...”

“... guarantors of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions ...”

“... to this mode of thinking, and the grounds for their perplexity have recently been explored by Richard Davis, Jennifer Jay and other experts in the United States. They have found that, far from having sunk into amoral pleasure-seeking, surprisingly large numbers of Chinese of all ages continued to resist the Mongols, often in quite pathological ...”

“... businessman, informed the Commons that he had been ‘brought up as a Victorian by a very stern Victorian father’ and knew it was perfectly possible for homosexuals to control themselves if they were sufficiently determined. Although Berkeley won the first Commons majority for reform, he lost his seat at the General Election, blaming his defeat on ...”

“... in the press and among the cybertrolls was that a new generation of soft judges was betraying the stern traditions of British justice. Only this November, Mr Justice Dingemans, renowned as the remorseless counsel to the Hutton Inquiry, broke down in tears as he sentenced the stepbrother of Becky Watts for her murder. Eight members of the jury were in tears ...”

“... Porter, traditional, carried out in the teeth of Abstract Expressionism, are subjected to a stern interrogation, during which any number of flaws are stigmatised (like Porter’s difficulty with faces) before Updike can allow himself the ludicrously indulgent comparison of Interior with a Dress Pattern to ‘the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio ...”

“... deadpan account of the tracking and capture of Eichmann in The House on Garibaldi Street; Richard Deacon, The Israeli Secret Service, which tells the story, among others, of Wolfgang Lotz, the Israeli spy with unassailably Aryan looks who infiltrated Egyptian government circles to get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story ...”

“... were courtiers, not councillors. There was distance between the flippancy they cultivated and the stern authoritarianism, iron drive and reforming zeal of the king’s leading advisers, those ‘Puritans of the Right’, Strafford and Laud. Even within the court their lifestyles were at odds with the chaste and fastidious decorum of the royal ...”

“... tournaments were expensive, lurid and boastful, teeming, jostling social occasions that were, as Richard Barber put it in Edward III and the Triumph of England, part Roman triumph, part circus. The last royal tournament of 1348 was held on 14 July, in Canterbury. ‘The costumes for the entry into the city,’ Barber writes, ‘required eight pounds of ...”

“... on his deep suspicion of any political activism which went further than words or argument. His stern approach to the Levellers, who were in truth his ideological ancestors, might have been seasoned – and his account enormously improved – if he could have savoured in full one of the most passionate and crucial arguments in English history. In the late ...”

“... modern world. I think of Edward’s London lectures on lateness, dazzling meditations on Adorno, Richard Strauss and Visconti. ‘It is as if,’ he said of these figures, ‘having achieved age they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability and official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded.’ In ...”

“... against the modern business practices of newfangled Quakers and Jews. (It is not surprising that Richard Ingrams of Private Eye should think G.K. Chesterton’s biography of Cobbett the best.) Hazlitt supported the Jews as much as the Catholics, and he rebuked Cobbett quite fiercely for being a ‘bullying antagonist’ to the Quakers. Though he admired and ...”

“... a scrawny arm and corrugated brow are sharply lit against deep shadow. His art was subjected to stern strictures by some of the most eloquent critics and theorists in Italy, yet it continued to be prized by collectors and valued by connoisseurs. By the end of the 17th century, however, Caravaggio’s work was increasingly being confused with that of ...”

“... spent 18 years ‘on the beach’ after a court-martial in 1921 had found him guilty of not taking stern enough measures against a body of rebellious reservists (in 1939 Captain Kennedy went down in the Atlantic commanding the armed merchant cruiser HMS Rawalpindi). The author wonders whether the boyhood friction with his dominant mother was a contributory ...”