“... your cast-offs has become a form of research, and, if you have shopped wisely, your archive may deserve an exhibition of its own. A professor of drama at Columbia has just donated 193 pieces to the Perry Ellis archive at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘Traditionally most designers did not think of archiving their careers,’ Valerie Steele, the ...”

“... by the Franks in 798, though another contemporary annalist puts the figure at 2901. But warfare may not be the appropriate context in which to assess the plausibility of the figure 4500. The massacre at Verden has to be understood as a political event. It would be better perhaps to compare the victims not to battlefield casualties but to hostages or ...”

“... always enact the opposite of the laws they so like to propose. Mrs Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, may be the funniest example. ‘I do not like to boast of my child,’ she announces, while doing so; or ‘People who suffer as I do from nervous complaints can have no great inclination for talking.’ In the same book Mr Collins is always prefacing his little ...”

“... Certain doomed spirits from the 16th century continue to haunt us and beguile us. On 21 May 1940 Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh on the subject:I used to masturbate whenever I thought about Lady Jane Grey so of course I thought about her constantly and even executed a fine watercolour of her on the scaffold, which my mother still has, framed, and in which Lady Jane and her ladies-in-waiting all wear watches hanging from enamel bows, as my mother did at the time … I still get quite excited when I think of Lady Jane (less and less often as the years roll on ...”

“... afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. It may seem ‘far-fetched’, Sharpe acknowledges, to connect the ‘casual flocks of pigeons’ that close the poem with the demise of a particular species, but he points out that ‘Sunday Morning’ was composed not long after the death of the last passenger ...”

“... necessary. The poor bloody infantry also deserves recognition and historical commemoration. This may seem a back-handed way of paying tribute to the work of George Peden, whose iron-clad research in the public records has established him as the leading authority on the 20th-century Treasury, which long served as the butt of much of Keynes’s criticism of ...”

“... instinctive authoritarian who seems to have no conception at all of the importance of liberty. It may be that Blunkett’s blindness had some bearing on this. He is a man who is intensely disciplined, but who has little experience of liberty; perhaps one could simply say that he has no feeling for it. He has overcome so many difficulties through willpower ...”

“... idea that a place or community might actually speak through the poet, or co-produce the poetry, may be a primitive one going back to a time when poet and place might be inseparable – was the Delphic Oracle a poet or a place? Some diggers-in emblematise that act to such an extent that their lives as well as their poetry and their place acquire an ...”

“... Dinosaur meets the Commission for Racial Equality,’ the Times snorted. ‘Whatever Britishness may be, it is surely not the mush that is now being proposed.’ All that one can say is that the mush spoken about Britishness matches the mush thought about Britishness by the inhabitants of this archipelago. In the British Social Attitudes survey, researchers ...”

“... turns out to be the real name of the Falling Man. Janiak hurt his back in one of the falls, he may or may not have been suicidal (he claimed his last jump would be without a harness, or was that just an artist’s self-promotion?) and he dies in the end of unrelated natural causes (a heart condition) somewhere near ...”

“... Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down ...”

“... fought and wrote his major poems, were a small proportion of the British Army as a whole, and it may be that their early deployment in 1940 immunised them against a general political infection. I doubt this, however: not even Spike Milligan reads like that. When British forces in Cairo held a mock election under the auspices of the Army Educational Command ...”

“... with firm, frontally presented bodies or with devices that enhance its given texture. Thus stone may, in his metaphors, ‘disclose itself’ or ‘grow steadfastly’, emerging into ‘stone-blossom’. The ideal carver merely helps the stone to unfurl. Taken as prompts to interest English readers in distant Italian reliefs, these marine and vegetable ...”

“... unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.’ This thought-provoking assertion captures a truth about the shift from the modern to the postmodern: there is something pastiche-like about a great many contemporary writers, not least those who write in a personal voice which is in ...”

“... a white nightgown, your hair fallen long’, with her young Italian lover (to whom she may or may not have been married) and their one-year-old son. All three died when they were swept overboard in a storm after an agonising 12-hour wait for rescue when their ship foundered on a sand bar within sight of shore at ...”