“... Working​ in 2010 on a knotty judgment about the power of the home secretary to include additional criteria in immigration rules that she had previously laid before Parliament as required by statute, something clicked in my memory. Four centuries earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him ...”

“... Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of support). At first glance, this may seem to be the literary and intellectual establishment in its pomp. Reference works and ...”

“... took time to show him around Merton College.After his Oxford stay, William went to see his brother Henry in Rye, where he was very excited to learn that G.K. Chesterton was staying at the inn next door. Intensely curious to see what Chesterton looked like, and much to his fastidious brother’s acute dismay, William leaned a ladder against the garden wall up ...”

“... can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the realities of political power. And that is not to speak of the lethal counter-enthusiasm, the ugly, race-tinted hatreds also provoked by the election of the first black president, the dogs baying on the White House lawn. Which of these public sentiments will prevail? Only time, as they ...”

“... movement against police brutality has rallied in recent years: ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Not black power, as in the 1970s or late 1960s, but life itself. Most black Americans believe that in the eyes of the law, to be black is to be guilty before being proved innocent; that to be a young black man in a hoodie or baggy trousers is to be a potential ...”

“... the memoirs of a senior MI5 official Peter Wright, that a secret file on Wilson, labelled the Henry Worthington file was kept in the MI5 director general’s safe. For good measure Wright and his friends were also convinced that a former head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, was also a Soviet spy. In July 1995 the Sunday Times, pushing a story strikingly similar ...”

“... Johnny is hearing things and speaking what he is hearing: the sound of his childhood, the old power of language, and a message he himself can’t understand. There is an obscure argument about charity here, and it appears in some form in all the Carol Reed films I’ve seen. It’s not a religious argument but a radically narrowed human one, and it is ...”

“... responsible, blaming ‘fathers who neglect to provide for their daughters, when it is in their power’. ‘The most crying evils of our luxurious age,’ she added, ‘arise from the pressure of poverty on those who are unprepared to meet it. The sins of the father are, by the workings of natural law, visited upon the children.’ Sewell neatly fuses ...”

“... which might have been elegantly resolved by an architect-engineer, were as nothing next to the power of the great estates that the rivers flow through – Wilton House and Longford Castle. Sixty years ago deference was assumed. The earls of Radnor and Pembroke did not get where they are by ceding their land for the common good. This holds true today, as ...”

“... a remarkable triumph of the female brain and will. It is a truly stunning victory for female power and control over the naturally promiscuous biology of the male. In starkly sexual, and evolutionary, terms, there is nothing in marriage for men.’ Is it possible that through some ghastly irony women’s lib has liberated men? The new woman who supports ...”

“... an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot used the deadly word ‘provincial’. Auden condemned a sentence from ‘William Wilson’ as vague and verbose, and Aldous Huxley summed up Poe as ‘one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste ...”

“... his bedazzled readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He ...”

“... end of addiction itself.’ Mailer has rhythm: better, he has not only a feeling for the mnemonic power of certain rhythms but also an understanding of how they are not only memorable but memory-charged. Like Dickens, with his spurts of feeling and of blood, he will lodge a blank-verse line where it is then full of a race-memory: ‘I removed the stone and ...”

“... a chance to fight Soviet or Marxist influence. Both local conditions and constraints on American power must yield to the ideological imperative. If it is thought that the Soviets are likely to remove a pro-Western ally, counter-measures must be taken to maintain the existing balance – a position described by the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for ...”

“... again and again found to have their roots in direct experience, observed or lived through; and the power of the best scenes in the fiction, the almost unbearable poignancy of many of the poems, come from the intensity with which the criss-cross haps and mishaps of the common world are felt. Hardy’s life often seems insufficiently detached from the web of ...”