“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... David Hume once remarked that the English had the least national character of any people in the universe. Perhaps this was a cunning Scottish put-down, since character is just what the English pride themselves on. They may not bestride the world in intellect, cuisine or emotional intimacy, but these fancy pursuits can be left to foreigners, and don’t count for much compared to their own moral robustness ...”

“... line? The retention of Normandy and the ancestral Plantagenet lands in Aquitaine as territories held in full sovereignty, independent of the French crown? Or was his claim, through Edward III, to the crown of France never to be renounced? Was the continued partition of France between the houses of Lancaster and Valois a viable solution? We will never ...”

“... rushed from church to church, singing psalms and smashing images. Two days later, the reformers held their first sermon in the town cathedral, now purified of the paintings and statues they believed tempted churchgoers into idolatry or lust. The Beeldenstorm, the ‘storm of images’ that swept across the Netherlands in 1566, affected almost every town in ...”

“... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the ...”

“... rider on a black horse’. He turned out to be dull as dishwater. Emma’s imagination was held hostage by the 19th-century bourgeois ideal of revelatory, eternal love within marriage. She was enmeshed in a particular set of historical circumstances – a flourishing letter-writing culture, burgeoning female literacy, an emerging awareness of urban ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... General Meetings. Normally, Tory MPs are allowed to ‘get on with the job’ rather than being held accountable as Labour MPs are supposed to be. (In practice, Constituency Labour Parties tend to take a generous view of their MPs’ deviations, if they are thought to be serious, on policy matters.) On this occasion, a significant number of Tory MPs were ...”

“... 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 ...”