“... in intellectual power’. But, for all that, Tennyson was perfectly assiduous in keeping up with major developments, including scientific discoveries (something of which Auden, who was also keen on science, might have been expected to approve), and he regularly kept company with some of the forbidding brains of the age. Jowett of Balliol sent the Tennysons a ...”

“... seized a thin chance to muzzle us.’ The papers didn’t, however, talk about the way the two major police investigations – Weeting, into phone hacking, and Elveden, into inappropriate payments to police – had come about, what they had revealed about what had been going on at the national redtops, or the fact that dozens of police officers and other ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... on fantasy, as the best intelligence service in the world – an image reinforced by novels like John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Agents of Innocence by the American writer David Ignatius. In recent years, however, a number of scandals have badly tarnished the reputation of Israel’s security services and stimulated calls for greater public ...”

“... that the 1984 Election would serve as a referendum on the divergent philosophies of the two major parties. Democratic candidates in the early going talked incessantly about their visions of the role of government. Both the Democratic and Republican platforms took pains to point out how starkly each differed from the other in its view of the state. The ...”

“... it to the cleaning methods favoured earlier in this century. While engaged on this sequence of major commissions Sansovino also made smaller sculptures – we know, for instance, that his patron Giovanni Gaddi owned a swan and a Venus, both carved in marble, of which no trace remains. No less significant is the fact that Gaddi owned a ‘boy of tow’ by ...”

“... concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. Most important, John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former POWs and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either ...”

“... Government sources dwarf those of any other country. The National Science Foundation (NSF) assumes major responsibility for basic research in most areas (annual budget: $2.5 billion), while the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), responsible for most basic biomedical research, has ballooned to $18 billion. By contrast, research in the humanities ...”

“... in his work a great change in 16th-century culture. During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, major European artists came to work in England. In these decades, King’s College chapel was completed, Holbein achieved his great portraits of the king, courtiers and gentry, and Torregiano was sculpting Henry VII for Westminster Abbey. But, though there were ...”

“... an advantage to government in starting a process of consultation and reform with some of the major facts already accomplished; but if this was the intention, the government has run into interesting and unforeseen difficulties. Against its wishes, the Constitutional Reform Bill was referred in March to a select committee in the Lords, where concerted ...”

“... secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with the headline ‘Brown Saves Pound’. Whelan, operating from his mobile phone on the pavement outside a pub, confirmed to the BBC and ITN: ‘Yes, Gordon is ruling out British ...”

“... with a touch’) and they themselves were advertised: ‘To be SOLD. A Black Girl, the Property of John Bull, Eleven Years of Age, who is extremely handy, works at her Needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well. Enquire of Mrs Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, the Strand.’ Huge, ornate images of negroes were displayed outside ...”

“... private property or surplus, without stress, in balance with nature. In a long conversation with John Carvel, far the most astonishing and winning part of this book, he lays out his own Livingstonian anthropology. These wandering bands did not know war, as the inhabitants of the nuclear-free zone of Lewisham shall not know war. They were ‘a very ...”

“... field that closes at night’. Some time in the evening of 28 September 1978 Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, abandoned his tenure of the throne of St Peter. He had been Pope for only 33 days. The news was entirely unexpected. Unlike his predecessor, John Paul had shown no signs of ill-health during his brief reign, and ...”

“... Mellon Centre in London, which has now published it as this Dictionary, under the editorship of John Ingamells. The Dictionary is unique in its comprehensiveness. No traveller from the British Isles or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere in Italy has been omitted, even if no more than his or her surname is known. The Mellon Centre’s ...”