“... much more rigid than that imputed to the democracies he despised. By placing his sabre at the service of the Third Reich, Krasnov turned it on himself, against his horsemen, and those ineffable horizons of the steppe. This taste for the exalted and the romantic, the cult of the lost home, the inability to be reconciled with ordinary life in exile led ...”

“... They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... this (and the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, which shows family loyalty being trumped in the service of God) denunciation of family members has often earned special opprobrium. In Western commentary on the Pavlik Morozov story, Pavlik’s denunciation is seen as infamous because its target was his father, implying an unnatural repudiation of family ...”

“... photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than with the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of ‘democratic citizenship’ and ‘civic identity’. Here original truths matter ...”

“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...”

“... McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... fucked in 46 of the 50 states. I wish I’d known this in 1952, when in my first weeks of National Service Basic Training I was in the next bed to a boy called Huggins, a steelworker from Sheffield whose frequent boast was that he had ‘had his hole’ in six or seven towns and cities, which he would then list. At the time I was less than impressed and ...”

“... Lord Chief Justices. The memory is not a warm one. This whole question of extra-curricular public service by judges – in public inquiries, commissions and so on – is one that has not been properly explored. Increasingly in recent years, judges have been asked to perform all manner of public duties way beyond the confines of the courtroom, sometimes ...”

“... is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards. She ...”

“... and on his return to Budapest he used his father’s influence to secure exemption from military service, though he worked briefly in the government censorship. By 1917 Lukács’s friends had formed an ideological nucleus in the form of a ‘Free School of the Humanities’, but his actual conversion to Communism only took place in December 1918, in ...”

“... a cult which Anglicanism bravely struggles to co-opt at the next morning’s annual Shakespeare Service. During this unusual ceremony stars from the RSC will perform the Bible readings, and a specially commissioned theologian will attempt to prove that the Complete Works are really all about the glory of God (having reminded the congregation that the ...”

“... the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the altar, where a glass case stood by itself, with a casket inside, containing the relics of St Theresa of Lisieux. A hundred years ago the Carmelite nun Thérèse Martin ...”

“... it sees the prose as a compound of bile and braggadocio – obstructive showing-off in the service of a complacent snobbery. One similarity between these two views, which is generally unrecognised or unacknowledged, is their assumption that there is something artificial or dead at the heart of Arnold’s prose, something which indicates a kind of ...”