“... Clement map out a distinct social territory. It lies in pockets of Hampstead and Barnes, in Oxford north of St Giles or on Boar’s Hill, where large families live in rambling old houses full of innocent laughter and fun, and favourite aunts and uncles and friends of the family come for lunch on Sunday, and amiable dogs bound about answering to clever ...”

“... the exhibition, are self-reliant, plain-living, God-fearing folk of a kind especially popular in North American art and literature. Looking at pictures such as this, we should ask ourselves whether, or rather to what extent, the character of the painting was determined by the regime which approved of it. There is a larger but less interesting selection of ...”

“... as certain as the pen-strokes of a master cartoonist.’ He was awkward to a tee. So the moment in North by Northwest when Grant puts on somebody’s else’s ill-fitting jacket epitomises his screen image. By 1959, when this film was made, Grant had spent some of his most famously ridiculous screen moments wearing clothes that were not his own: a feathery ...”

“... the political-social mind would be in accord. One of our most revered nationalist rebels, John Mitchel, may illustrate. Born about a hundred years ago, a freedom-fighter, transported to Van Diemen’s Land, escaped to America, he was honoured there until he was found to be in favour of black slavery. So, from the paper called the Citizen (New ...”

“... He died on 24 May, of cancer, at the age of 87. Mitchell was born on 27 July 1908, in Fairmont, North Carolina, a small farming community interspersed with swamps and woods, fifty miles or so inland from the Atlantic Ocean. His father was a farmer and a tobacco and cotton trader, and his ancestors on both sides had farmed land in the region since before the ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... against the MP Owen Paterson, and then again on 17 December, he discussed the loss of Paterson’s North Shropshire seat at the by-election necessitated by his resignation. On both occasions, Dowden insisted that what voters really wanted was for the government to ‘get on with the job’. This was an unfortunate choice of words. Jobbery – the improper use ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”

“... its transitions.On 1 June 2020, a gathering of Black Lives Matter supporters in Lafayette Square, north of the White House, was attacked by heavily armed security forces from various federal agencies, including the US Park Police, the Bureau of Prisons Special Operations Response Teams and National Guardsmen. While dispersing the peaceful crowd to clear the ...”

“... the forests stretch into southern Sudan and Central African Republic. In the semi-arid plateaux of north Darfur, as the savannas fade into desert, we saw only the occasional gazelle. Hilal was a commanding figure, even in his eighties, thin, stooped and nearly blind. The Sufis – and almost all Darfurians are followers of one or another Sufi sect, mostly of ...”

“... to prove the nastiness of Communism. His Marxist education started in earnest in a prison camp in North Korea after he and other agents had been captured as a result of typical MI6 bungling. He had nothing to read except Das Capital and State and Revolution in Russian. They worked wonders. So Blake, SIS man, became a Communist. What to do then? He calls his ...”

“... to yourself,’ in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic ...”

“... of letters. Of her siblings, a younger sister is Beatrix Lehmann, the actress, her younger brother John Lehmann, poet, and fructifying editor and founder of the London Magazine. Most sensitive, literate girls write out the agonies of growing up, at least in private poetry or prose. But from such a family as Rosamond Lehmann’s, one writes to publish. In an ...”

“... puts it: ‘When you’re dead you’ll regret not having fun with your genital organs.’ And John Whitworth: Enough of solitary vice. Better to carve yourself a slice Of life, for, as the poet said, There’s fuck-all fucking when you’re dead. The 18th-century section is surprisingly thin, with Swift showing himself the master of cultivated and ...”

“... New Zealand stamp had gone missing. I would like to think the story begins on New Zealand’s North Island one day in the late 1890s. One of Wellington’s early stamp designers, J. Gaut, is looking in a southeasterly direction across the blue expanse of Lake Taupo at a large volcanic crater out of which rise the snow-clad peaks of Mount Ruapehu, an ...”