“... he was the one with the camera. ‘Anyone could be in that suit,’ the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones said of the picture of Aldrin. ‘It is a portrait of humanity evolving before our eyes into something new and extraordinary. It’s as if the moon’s surface has overwhelmed Aldrin’s face, or even become it.’ I’m not so sure: I see only Aldrin. That ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... of Melissa Bank (a Moore follower if ever there was one) and Sex and the City and Bridget Jones. Except that Self-Help also now reads like a self-consciously historical document, a John Dos Passos-like collage. As well as simply telling stories about young women working and dreaming in 1980s Manhattan etc ...”

“... that ‘there had been a number of similar claims in the media and that the evidence of Dr Brian Jones’ – a senior government scientist – ‘showed that the report that there was concern in intelligence circles was correct.’9 As far as Lord Hutton was concerned, all this was neither here nor there. The ‘communication by the media of information on ...”

“... selling ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ T-shirts. They have generated so much fuss that in 2018 Owen Jones had to make clear: ‘If you want to kiss Tories, Momentum are not going to stop you.’ However, to large swathes of the left, the idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for ...”

“... by the Tory life peer Dido Harding, herself a former McKinsey consultant. Harding’s husband, John Penrose, another former McKinsey consultant and a Tory MP, was at the time the ‘anti-corruption champion’ at the Home Office. During the pandemic, he hit the headlines for trying to absolve Owen Paterson, a fellow Tory MP, who had improperly lobbied on ...”

“... alive by bugs’; in another ‘vile room’ in the same tenement, his elderly neighbour Mr Jones painted ‘Christmas sheets’ (presumably wrapping paper) from 9 a.m. every morning, managing forty dozen in two days. The investigators added their own animadversions and even novelistic touches. The Reverend the Honourable R. Henley, vicar of St ...”

“... commissioned England’s first classical building, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, from Inigo Jones, and masques from Ben Jonson – nicely summed up by Gareth Russell as ‘light on story and heavy on cost’. James was less enamoured of his new subjects. As he made his way down through England to take the throne, he became exasperated with all the ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... opinion, he simply saw himself as being above the ‘rules of the game’. The incomparable John Vincent has his own interpretation of the supposed liberalism of Mosley’s early days: ‘There were no depths of idealism to which he would not stoop in his attempt to find a winning formula for controlling the post-war mind.’ Inflamed by the ...”

“... Oxford who caused him concern’: he believed him to be his illegitimate brother. Her grandfather John Horatio Lloyd had, in the 1830s, ‘exposed himself in the Temple Gardens’ and run ‘naked in the sight of some nursemaids’, thus losing the opportunity to become solicitor-general. He ‘was forced to retire from political and legal work for four ...”

“... nature’s experiments, not as the culmination of nature’s design, echoes Berlin’s use of John Stuart Mill’s phrase ‘experiments in living’. (It also, of course, echoes Jefferson’s and Dewey’s use of the term ‘experiment’ to describe American democracy.) Like Berlin, I have been criticising the Platonic-Kantian attempt to do what Berlin ...”

“... was indicted for ‘unlawfully receiving the naked private parts of a person in his mouth’; John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these ...”

“... Kermode also notices that this transgressive interest goes both ways. The proletarian writer Lewis Jones, whose novels portray political struggles at a Welsh mine, praises the enviably ‘magnificent body’ of the coal-owner’s son. Kermode’s argument is built on an implicit contrast between relations of love and relations of power, and between the ...”

“... he speaks of Keats as ‘ribbing’ the Reynolds sisters, or refers to Keats’s friend Isabella Jones’s connection to ‘her possessive sugar daddy O’Callaghan’. He says of Keats’s style, ‘classical references and painterly gestures would all become trademarks.’ Trademarks: did Keats think, ‘Well, one of my trademarks will be classical ...”