“... 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 ...”

“... it won in 1997 in what most assumed were freak victories. Of Labour’s 30 most marginal seats it held 23 with increased majorities. The Tories won only four Labour marginals with decisive swings, and two of those, Romford and Upminster, are idiosyncratic. Those conspicuous beneficiaries of Thatcherism, Reading and Swindon, swung further to Labour – in ...”

“... absurdities, its partings and comings together, its superstructure of sexual theory, is very well held, and although we’re asked to see the story rather more from the wife’s point of view than the husband’s, Maddox won’t give her the benefit of outraged or sentimental feminism; she even dares to speak of ‘Frieda’s tedious insistence that she was ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies,’ may have been meant only metaphorically, but ...”

“... sacrifice his life to the national cause, and that was the measure of his worth. Norwid, however, held that it was a violation of natural rights to relate the meaning of human life to armed struggle and to nothing else. He mocked the ‘forlorn hope’ gestures, the over-dramatised martyrology. In all this he saw an anti-intellectualism, a contempt for ...”

“... ruthless towards former lovers. This cannot be quite right: people as cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic depression and self-loathing. That kind of behaviour is surely evidence more of emotional turmoil. The world of Edwardian leftish journalism inhabited by Sharp was dominated by two opposed currents. A ...”

“... replaced the wisdom of the ancestors. ‘Till about the yeare 1649,’ Aubrey wrote, it was ‘held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning; and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers.’ As the Christian narrative of the Fall gave way to a sense of history as progress and steady ...”

“... eight million. It operated two administrative capital cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. It held Fallujah and for a time Ramadi, sixty miles from Baghdad, as well as innumerable small towns and villages, much desert and a good deal of irrigated countryside. The horrors of IS rule are well known: the killings of Shia; the choice offered to the Christians ...”