“... threat. With the SNP looking certain to be the main opposition party in the new Parliament, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Tories, pledged to support a minority Labour administration faced with a no confidence motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the ...”

“... them by the lottery of inheritance and who could not manage without their mayors of the palace or grand viziers, especially in their minorities or inexperienced beginnings. But this did not satisfy Bérenger, who preferred a less personal, more structured analysis in terms of the growing complexity of the Early Modern state, which favoured the interposition ...”

“... to begin that from this distance seems like happiness.’ In Consciousness and the Novel (2002), David Lodge quotes V.S. Ramachandran describing the need ‘to reconcile the first person and third person accounts of the universe’ as ‘the single most important problem in science’. Lodge goes on to argue that novels – particularly novels written in ...”

“... Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip ...”

“... of his marriage, much of the speech is unremarkable. (Their love, represented by the Bechstein grand piano that my grandparents were given on their silver anniversary, nearly cost her her life. Unwilling to leave it, she stayed in Hamburg for 12 years after her husband’s death. She finally left in December 1939; the Bechstein stayed; his music scores ...”

“... Bishop’s poems convey the feel of the gap between perception and understanding, between the grand truths we may want and can almost feel coming into being, and the rush of often bewildering particulars we actually experience. The poems do not announce this teetering on the brink of epiphany, but dramatise it, which makes it hard to convey the complexity ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to stir him. The ‘tone of mandarin ...”

“... hates Alan’s scheme of theft and she hates his drunken insults, although she would not give a grand name to her disapproval.She and the writer have an argument about honour. ‘When you live in shameful times,’ he says, ‘shame descends upon you, shame descends upon everyone, and you have simply to bear it, it is your lot and your punishment. Am I ...”

“... is much more than the way a building looks or the materials used in its construction: it is grand design and it begins when groups or individuals act in a space – ‘space’ being comprehensively defined to include anything that has a territorial dimension. ‘Acting’ in space might take the form of targeted assassination from the air and extends ...”

“... The most obvious precedent for Richter’s paintings of his daughters is the work of Caspar David Friedrich’s friend Georg Friedrich Kersting, whose paintings of women in domestic interiors, such as The Embroiderer (1812), also focus on the nape of the neck. Absorbed in their own activity, these women turn away from the artist as the artist turns away ...”

“... himself in virtu land.’The posting, which lasted until 1800, has been described as a 35-year grand tour. Hamilton spent beyond his means on Roman vases, as well as paintings by Titian, Holbein and the many others that flooded the European market as the French aristocracy sold up. But to the surprise and irritation of Walpole and other friends, he also ...”

“... own politics remained Whiggish, unpredictable. Students, noting his snobbish style and grand contacts, supposed him a Tory. But in the strict sense, he never was. Over Suez in 1956, he called Anthony Eden a ‘vain, ineffectual Man of Blood’, and reviled ‘the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief ...”

“... study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga at the time of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist uprising in ...”

“... with anger (for the benefit of listeners in Hanoi) about the Vietnam War. Here and at Camp David, Nixon was a terrified witness to Brezhnev’s addiction to speed, as he screeched cars round tight corners and on one occasion bashed the sump out of a new limousine. Knowing his lust for fast cars, the Americans gave him a Cadillac and then a Lincoln ...”

“... Mary de Rachewiltz (Pound’s daughter by the American violinist Olga Rudge), and Joanna and David Moody (who is at work on a multi-volume biography of Pound) have chosen to include every message from the poet to his parents in its entirety, however mundane. I suppose one might pause to note from the above the extent to which Pound was open to sharing ...”