“... tongue, which is so repugnant to those who are capable of correct, elegant and pure speech’. He held the old idiom to have ‘contributed to the rudeness of the common man’. Introducing his translation of the Bible into correct 18th-century German (which he still wrote in Hebrew script), Mendelssohn declared himself hopeful that ‘good results’ would ...”

“... it turned out – for socialist deviation from nationalist purity. Some of the party’s old guard held that the cause of independence was unideological in itself, neither of the right nor of the left. Maxwell’s radical kindergarten of Marxisant republican hipsters was as welcome to the party elders – who formed another internal group, the Campaign for ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... we still want a vocabulary with which to capture the central and urgent importance which politics held not only for Marvell but for a host of Renaissance and 17th-century writers. More, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Greville, Milton: all those men wrote about public events; some of them wrote to influence their course; and none of them would have ...”

“... the best of these books are the ones we keep rereading. Tokyo Year Zero, the 2007 predecessor to David Peace’s new novel, conforms in its early pages to the first kind of mystery, specifically those described with cool backhandedness by Elizabeth Bowen when she wrote that ‘the only above-board grown-up children’s stories are detective ...”

“... there appears a certain natural goodness verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the ...”

“... last only a few days, it is already the case that the smoke from last year’s fires can be held responsible for five thousand additional pre-term births in the state. Globally, the world’s wildfire smoke delivers only a fraction of air pollution, but the fraction is growing. The 2021 fires are still smouldering, and wildfire emissions from this year ...”

“... beat us with, and pursues the possibility that their weaknesses might be the obverse of our own. David Nettler, the language expert who falls into Oitarian thought patterns, gives a long account of what it is like to enter that alien ‘mindscape’: Somehow the senses – the body – seemed to grow dim, so that it was an inert mechanism, like a corpse ...”

“... was the idol of the hour and the prophet and theorist of a new British Empire. The vision he held out was utopian. The ramshackle Empire was to be reorganised into a world-state of self-governing nations, freely co-operating and acting as one in defence, trade, foreign policy and ideals of citizenship. As Seeley had taught, the British would cease to ...”

“... Within days of his death, he and his poetry were appropriated for public use. The young pacifist David Garnett spoke bitterly of how Eddie Marsh exploited Rupert’s image in the 1918 Memoir: We like our boys to wear their hair rather long – to dabble in Socialism, to dabble in ‘decadence’ ... to fancy they really care about ethics – but all the ...”

“... see, of our plans for the evening and the rest of the season. And of the impending publication of David Gower’s autobiography.* This had been ghosted by Martin Johnson, a man who, since he began following Leicestershire for the Leicester Mercury back in 1973, two years before Gower’s first-class career began there, had known him better than most. The ...”

“... insurance industry. There may be domestic policy reasons for doing it, but Brussels should not be held responsible. As part of the Lisbon Treaty negotiations the UK got an opt-out from most of the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. The charter reproduces the rights included in the European Convention on Human Rights, which isn’t an EU treaty, but was ...”

“... Kiefer​ first came to public attention in London in A New Spirit in Painting, the exhibition held in 1981 at the Royal Academy. It’s fitting, then, that this should be the venue for the first full retrospective in Britain, curated by Kathleen Soriano (until 14 December). Kiefer has always divided critics, some taking fright at his heavy Germanic ...”

“... about and little dissatisfaction with the lowliness of his status as a clerk, a position he has held, more or less contentedly, for more than twenty years. And so when he is intercepted one morning at Central Terminal by a detective called Pith, given a copy of the detectives’ handbook, The Manual of Detection, and told he has been promoted – is, in ...”

“... ad hoc inquiries into a defined issue, were not in fashion at the time. The last one had been held fourteen years earlier. But the Conservative home secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced on the day of the Birmingham Six’s release that a Royal Commission would look into the criminal justice system.Led by W.G. Runciman, a sociologist and hereditary ...”