“... four generations. This rejected the understanding of Christianity as creed, not lineage, that had held for more than a millennium. The king and the pope both opposed the restrictions, yet they were widely adopted across Spain and then Portugal, especially after a later, Spanish pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in 1495. By the end of the 15th ...”

“... dominant American politician without a shadow of rivalry. If the next presidential election were held today, he would be the Republican nominee and he would probably win. A Gallup poll on 18 June showed him at 45 per cent approval; this dropped a notch or two after the Helsinki debacle; but Rasmussen (a more accurate predictor of the 2016 election) now has ...”

“... responded as he always did, by raising the stakes. He lobbied Congress. He revived a long-held plan to buy the Tour de France – not to bribe the authorities, but actually to purchase the whole damn thing – so that he could run the race his way (he needed to raise $1.5 billion, a figure that eventually proved beyond even him). He hired the best ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by then at work on, Mays outlined in a 1996 lecture what he meant by his title, ‘Coleridge’s ...”

“... to have been foreseen from the time of my birth, for they gave me a couple of good Jewish names, David and Bernard, but preceded them with Anthony. I was always called Tony. This perhaps went well with the sort of role my mother wanted me to play. When I was eight she said she would like me to have a career like Noël Coward’s; later she suggested that I ...”

“... Russians around the Black Sea coast – two decades earlier, the ambitious young British diplomat David Urquhart had been sacked for making such an attempt in Circassia, just east of the Crimea, which Russia was then trying to subjugate. British and French caution reflected an anxiety that a Balkan war of nationalities would destroy Ottoman rule. At the 1856 ...”

“... in his Bromley and Chislehurst constituency. A couple of months earlier, another Conservative MP, David Morris, apologised for lobbying on behalf of an energy firm that had given him £10,000. Morris had urged the energy minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, to lobby Ofgem to change regulations in ways that could benefit Aquind Limited, which is seeking to build an ...”

“... just a few doors down from the offices of UnHerd, an online publication he also owns – and held a meeting with the magazine’s staff, at which he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s ...”

“... under President Obama. The women were also protesting against the conditions in which they were held. In 2015, Women for Refugee Women had published a pamphlet describing those conditions under the title I Am Human. It asked why, for example, women in detention were being watched in intimate situations – in the toilet or the shower, or in bed – by male ...”

“... with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The ...”

“... done well to begin by heading for Button’s coffeehouse in Russell Street where the great man held court, and be as submissively impressive as possible. Almost three hundred years later, though sadly not for very long, you could make your way to the Pillars of Hercules in Greek Street, where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be ...”

“... is tacitly an admission that the two, the same and not the same, will always be magnetically held apart and held together by being like-poles. Kipling’s McAndrew discerned a Calvinistic predestination in ‘the stride o’ yon connectin’ rod’, and Ricks appears to identify some type of Medieval Catholic solder ...”

“... makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine without any attempt to be funny. The Modern Common Wind is about leprosy in Kenya and could fairly be advertised as ‘not for ...”

“... to be reminded. The Altarpiece in the Renaissance consists of papers delivered at a conference held at the Warburg Institute and Birkbeck College in 1987. It includes studies of sculpture as well as painting and of altarpieces in the Netherlands, Germany and Spain as well as Italy. The most stimulating paper is one by Bernhard Decker which speculates on ...”