“... film, xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity: wealthy people should be gracious towards the poor and hungry in their midst (without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty). Many of the film’s implicit values directly contradict those of Homer’s ...”

“... the property rights, of the allegedly consanguine state that has taken its poorer cousin in out of charity ... As for literature after reunification, George Steiner thought there could be none anyway after Hitler; but he had in mind the bureaucratic degeneration of the language. The question reactivates the matter of tradition, and of the framework in which ...”

“... only four places each year: a very small dent in Middlesbrough’s 30 per cent youth unemployment. Tom Blenkinsop, newly elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, showed a similar sort of anxiety about the UK’s industry when I spoke to him at Westminster on the first day back after Parliament’s summer break. He emerged from behind the ...”

“... spirit – and in his last speeches: the Second Inaugural (‘with malice toward none; with charity for all’), and the speech on reconstruction that followed it. Yet Lincoln opposed slavery without reservation. He believed that the imposition of slavery – not only on black people but on the manners, the morale and the laws of a society based on ...”

“... for the engraved versions of his graphic novels: the ‘progresses’, illustrating the lives of Tom Rakewell and Moll Hackabout, and Marriage à la Mode, the story of the disastrous arranged marriage of a city merchant’s daughter to the son of an earl. By issuing these and other series of his paintings as prints, Hogarth had gained more currency for his ...”

“... of Perkins’s preferences, the other two are Thom Gunn and C.H. Sisson). In the opposing camp, Tom Paulin provoked an indignant response in this journal in 1985 when he indicted Hill for his reactionary and derivative ‘kitsch feudalism’. Hill’s admirers responded with extreme defensiveness, representing Paulin’s intrusion of politics into the realm ...”

“... definition of religion itself.’ In Britain, Scientology is not recognised as a religion or as a charity, but it is a not-for-profit organisation and as such is exempt from VAT. Only the Royal Navy officially designates it a religion. Urban takes no position on whether or not Scientology should qualify as a religion; he argues that religion is a form of ...”

“... was mentioned during the service. The stress was on forgiveness (rather than on the gratitude for charity with which I grew familiar – ‘Haven’t you been lucky! Such a wonderful opportunity! And while we were struggling on over in England’). Who should be forgiven in the case of the City of Benares: the Admiralty, who may not have made clear the ...”

“... centres for victims of domestic violence closed between 2010 and 2014. The TUC found that the LGBT charity and voluntary sector took a ‘real and significant’ hit in the same period. The list could be extended almost indefinitely: tens of thousands of streetlights are now switched off after midnight, plunging whole areas into darkness at a risk to drivers ...”

“... floats something more complicated. The dedication is to Ann Cotton, the founder of CamFed, a charity that supports the education of girls in sub-Saharan Africa, as a note explains – so never mind Oxford or Harvard. To read The Last Samurai for the first time is to experience an odd mix of emotions. With its kanji and its carbon dating, it seems so new ...”

“... Friday, when this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands.16 April. A card from Tom King with news of the tattoo of me that he had put on his arm (pictured in the Diary published in the LRB of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing ...”

“... crooked-toothed boy from Bromley: he is simultaneously star and fan, both Ground Control and Major Tom. It isn’t just about the words: you can hear it in his voice throughout the album, the way his accent veers between South London, the Home Counties and somewhere else entirely; the way the melody bobs along at a hummable level before suddenly shooting off ...”

“... of lawsuits in forma pauperis by which indigent suitors were given ‘process and counsel of charity’. This survived, along with the humiliating system of dock briefs, into the mid-20th century, and not solely at the margins. In 1965, as a pupil barrister, I was briefed in forma pauperis to appear before the Privy Council on a petition for leave to ...”

“... for intercepts they know nothing about. As Vanbrugh had it, ‘they have too much zeal to have any charity; they make debauches in piety as sinners do in wine.’ These base people, remarkably without a single criminal conviction between them, are involved, as Brown says, in ‘a race to the bottom driven by ever-receding profitability’. The Nazi politician ...”

“... written in January 1937 from the Herbert home, Pixton Park, to his old Lancing contemporary, Tom Driberg, then a gossip columnist on the Daily Express: I have got engaged to be married, and shall be announcing the fact early next week. I don’t imagine the story will be of great news value but if you care to publish it you can have it a day ahead of ...”