“... become, even from his own point of view. The state of public opinion has been well summarised by Michael Quinlan, a former Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, writing in the Tablet (1 February): It has become more and more widely recognised, in much of United States opinion as well as almost overwhelmingly elsewhere, that a ...”

“... seven months at the Press Lehmann made his first appearance as an editor when he commissioned Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... A short paragraph on page 234, for instance, consists of a snippet each from ‘the philosopher Michael Polanyi’, ‘the literary theorist M.M. Bahktin’, ‘the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’. In some cases it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that either Sennett or his research assistants have fudged their homework: surely if Sennett had read the ...”

“... transformation of Irish society by introducing Catholic emancipation at the same time, which George III frustrated because he found it inconsistent with his coronation oath. Indeed, Walker and Greer note that the Protestant Orange Order, established in 1795, opposed legislative union in 1800 precisely because its members thought it would immediately lead ...”

“... A considerable amount of research has been carried out into the practice in recent years. Michael Ebner’s Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (2010) used hundreds of archival files to piece together the experience of everyday Italians under the dictatorship and showed that torture and beatings were common in confino, food scarce and of poor ...”

“... status as citizens, could not be held to have violated their allegiance by rebellion.In 1781 Lord George Gordon stood trial in London for treason, having provoked anti-Catholic riots in the course of which the townhouse of the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, had been burned down (a personal interest that appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield ...”

“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a ...”

“... by the following morning the building was a blackened shell.’Afterwards a telegram arrived from George Bernard Shaw: ‘You must be delighted. Congratulations. It will be a tremendous advantage to have a proper modern building. There are a number of other theatres I should like to see burned down.’ Shaw had opened the final season in the old ...”

“... poor man, having given away much of his wealth in his pursuit of good causes. First as a Lloyd George Liberal before the First World War, hot for the People’s Budget and land taxes, then as a fervent supporter of the Independent Labour Party, bent on expropriation of his own class, Percy Taylor took a Robin Hood view of politics. His party trick was to ...”

“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her ...”

“... was in the middle of a recession and Parliament didn’t spend much time on Crossrail. As Sir George Young, the MP for Ealing (and Leader of the House from 2010 until Cameron’s recent reshuffle), put it, ‘the report is conducted in a financial vacuum.’ Young joked that, since Barran’s Crossrail tunnel passed under Buckingham Palace, the queen ...”

“... were both major beneficiaries.The American policy-world consensus, articulated most notably by George Kennan and his State Department colleague Robert F. Kelley but shared by Amcomlib officers, combined Soviet phobia with an element of Russophilia. The Americans saw the Russians as good people, oppressed by a bad government that was not of their ...”

“... Mabel Dickinson, who gave him a terrible scare when she claimed she was pregnant. The marriage to George Hyde-Lees, and the Wild Old Man’s sexual goings-on in his last years, have to wait for the next volume. It is notable that the women who attracted Yeats, and were attracted by him, were nearly all occultists of one sort or another, and many were actively ...”