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“... could hardly be bettered. In the sphere of analysis, on the other hand, a good deal remains to be said. It might have been wise, for a start, to cite the contemporary definitions of political corruption. In the Marconi debate of June 1913 Asquith produced six ‘don’ts’ for a minister. Three of these were concerned with the minister’s obligation never ...”

“... such as Whitehead, Toynbee, Eliot, Churchill and Evelyn Waugh. ‘It was not until it began to be said in Jesus that Peterhouse was willing to get rid of Knowles that Butterfield was in a position to persuade Vellacott that Peterhouse had a duty to keep him,’ writes Cowling with relish, and we know where we are. The parochialism is partly related to an ...”

“... revelations went on for weeks.What had undone NSO was a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers said to have belonged to those targeted by NSO’s clients. From Mexico through Morocco and Rwanda to Italy and Hungary, across the Gulf States to Saudi Arabia and all the way to India, Pegasus had been used to monitor, harass, silence and detain. Even family ...”

“... late on in her commendably thorough dual biography. ‘John regarded this as a compliment and said he wished there were more opportunities to make such discreet interventions.’ To ‘Piper’ a building is to subject it to collage, blackout and inky, fiddly bits. As George VI is said to have stammered on viewing the ...”

“... grandfather in an epic Netflix series, The Crown, William offered only one word. ‘Legend,’ he said, as if they were talking about Dolly Parton. And that is the way the boys view their grandfather, as a one-off, a classic exemplar, rather than the mythic, intransigent beast of agonised loyalty known to their father. The Duke of Edinburgh becomes a wayward ...”

“... female genitals. I had been taught the term ‘front-bottom’ as a child. Very little needs to be said here about how stupid this is. My husband and I opted instead for ‘vulva’. It’s functional, but it does sound strange in certain contexts. My daughter recently asked me if the Beatrix Potter frog, Jeremy Fisher, had a tail or a bottom. I wasn’t sure ...”

“... its US counterpart preferred .1 r/day. But it scarcely mattered. As the chair of the US committee said, ‘we just didn’t see any difference between .2 and .1.’ The limit thus carefully derived was extended without change to gamma rays and then, during the war, to other radiations by a factor to account for the different biological effects of massless and ...”

“... and dutiful’ (George V), a threat ‘to the probity and the pageantry’ (Edward VIII), ‘simple yet sacred, mundane but magical’ (George VI) – are seen as functionally subordinate to the ‘romance and escapism’ which has sustained this up-market soap opera for so long. In recent years, moreover, the cleverly projected ...”

“... distinguished poems here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another ...”

“... carries all before it: men are guilty. They do not care, least of all for their own. As in Edward Albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the child, imagined or real, is everybody’s child, and is the weapon used by everybody’s parents. Rowan Anderson is insane in his carelessness, his deadness. But it is a mark of Blackwood’s intelligence ...”

“... the train was bound for somewhere on the Marne.    ‘It’s a grim grey region,’ my friend said. Yeats, I seem to recall, dreamed that G.B. Shaw was ‘a sewing-machine that clicked and smiled’. Greene sticks a kitchen knife into W.H. Auden and this makes no impression at all, so they settle down to chat. Auden says he holds a position on the ...”

“... that they should remember their birthdays. In Scott of the Antarctic Elspeth Huxley noted that Dr Edward Wilson’s 39th occurred during a side-trip to study the emperor penguins: ‘quite the funniest birthday I have ever spent’. In the novel, when Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans mentions his birthday in an attempt at emotional blackmail, Scott dismisses ...”

“... the Ashcan School of artists, who portrayed everyday working-class scenes (his students included Edward Hopper); the book opens with the statement that ‘art when really understood is the province of every human being.’ Haring had only just begun his course, but decided to drop out: ‘If I was going to be an artist, that’s what I was going to ...”

“... Edward I knew a thing or two about coal. He hated its stink, and in 1306 banned the burning of it in his kingdom, threatening offenders with ‘great fines and ransoms’. There are even records of coal-burners being hanged, tortured or decapitated (sources don’t agree on the punishment: it’s possible all three were applied ...”

“... of particular faiths, the country shook with indignation – not at what the prelate had actually said, but at the menacing story the broadcast and print media extracted from it. The Sun’s uniquely helpful contribution was a ‘Bash the Bishop’ campaign, corroborating Martin Amis’s suggestion in Yellow Dog about the way the red-tops view their ...”