“... authors. ‘By warding off the Jews,’ he said, quoting Hitler, ‘I struggle for the work of the Lord.’Still, the Nazis didn’t consider him tough enough, even when he came up with a legal basis for Germany’s territorial expansion. He fell from favour. After the war he was detained by the Americans and the Soviets, responded to interrogation with ...”

“... he first visited the cabinet room, Cummings found no tools at all. ‘In the 19th century at least Lord Salisbury used the fireplace as a tool. He would walk around the table, gather sensitive papers, and burn them at the end of meetings. The fire is now blocked. The only other tool, the clock, did not work when I was last there. Over a century, the physical ...”

“... time happened to reach the gaol in time to drive off the people. Crowds again gathered outside Lord Kingsborough’s lodgings and tried to break in.’ ‘Mob’ suggests mindlessness and lack of civility. ‘Some sort’ is also dismissive. ‘By good fortune’ for whom? Hardly for ‘the mob’. ‘Drive off’ as opposed to persuade, or convince, or ...”

“... its author had read ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’. Both are by John Leicester Warren, Lord de Tabley. Not that he doesn’t write well, but the well-made poem is not what Eliot and Pound made of Tennyson and Browning. What is most individual in the anthology is that which lies outside the orbit of the great names: ...”

“... were not to expect the approval of the new Church of England either: the earth is thine, O Lord, and all that is contained therein; we heartily pray thee to send thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures and dwelling places of the earth that they, remembering themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out ...”

“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”

“... in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain ...”

“... lobbyists and pro-corporate think tanks that refuse to declare their donors. The company is run by James Frayne, a long-standing ally of Cummings, and Rachel Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative manifesto. Having previously run focus groups for the Department for International Trade and the Cabinet Office, Public First has been given contracts worth more ...”

“... a racialist crowd while later saying, ‘Who, me?’, now claims to have been delivered by the Lord from his earlier segregationist prison. Jackson, who set out as a rainbow warrior, has also kept company with bigots and claims to have been cleansed by the experience. Both know as much about South Africa as I do about molecular biology. It’s a curious ...”

“... wore down the unjust disapproval, and her drawing-room in St John’s Wood was crowded with what Lord Acton called the most remarkable society in London. ‘Poets and philosophers united to honour her,’ he wrote; ‘the aristocracy of letters gathered round the gentle lady, who was justly esteemed the most illustrious figure that has arisen in literature ...”

“... with features almost sculptural in their clarity and bodies rendered in solid swathes of colour. James Hepburn (1922) and Rupert Doone (1922-23), in particular, are reminiscent of the stylised portraits of Modigliani (Hamnett was a close friend of his). Her bust-length paintings aren’t set in recognisable interiors but place their sitters against muted ...”

“... have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after Shakespeare’s company had been adopted as the King’s Men. It has usually been read as an ostentatiously effortless display of how a degree-less provincial could match university-educated courtly playwrights such as John Lyly at their own game. The ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo ...”

“... the absorption of his identity into the ‘countenance’ or ‘port’ of his royal master. At James I’s coronation, Shakespeare, who had only recently gone to such trouble and expense to secure a coat of arms for his family, would have had to submerge that hard-won status in the livery that announced his subservient position as one of the ‘King’s ...”

“... intervals firmly clasped in an Establishment embrace. Fifty or sixty years ago there would be a Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall, a reception given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, grand dinners in great houses, even a Royal Garden Party. Of course, nowadays the home church hosts – the poor, buffeted, derided C of E – would have difficulty ...”