“... have four dozen, which I pack into my towel. A plenary line of Seamus Heaney’s about the singer David Hammond’s thatched cottage at Dooey comes to mind – ‘I say to myself Gweebarra.’ Then I think of these lines from another poem, ‘Oysters’: Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ...”

“... died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and uncredited) David Bailey portrait, the Sixties icon that makes the Twins look like two portions of Robert Maxwell, split by an axe. The Krays allowed Pearson the status of a nightclub photographer with a flash in his fist. He was supposed to offer his contribution to their ...”

“... a grotesque war dance for the delectation of some visiting anthropologists, he notes that ‘David Owen and companions are today’s version of the expedition to the New Zealand tribe: they act and react exactly in the same way, overlooking how the entire spectacle of “old hatreds suddenly erupting in their primordial cruelty” is a dance staged for ...”

“... man ‘who began his memoir with the sentence: “In a land of moral imbeciles, I knew I could be king.”’ All the same, the final stretch of Lee’s life was quite sad, and in Riesman’s telling it becomes a kind of goofy parable about the dangers of attaching a single face to collaborative endeavours. There’s a theory that the modern notion of ...”

“... was possible to give names with thinly veiled significance, such as Philanax (‘dear or friendly king’) and Euarchus (‘good ruler’), to characters in an Arcadian romance, as Sir Philip Sidney did. Or, like Edmund Spenser, whom Fowler sees as the great originator of English characteronyms, you might mingle popular pastoral names such as Colin in among ...”

“... in his pocket, unable to speak French and not knowing anybody there, and before long was the king of dressmakers. Each season he held court, showing several designs in his atelier (on live models!) to select clients, who would choose their outfits and be measured up inhouse. Empress Eugénie, his foremost patron, was still waited on at the Elysée (until ...”

“... book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a ...”

“... lectures sprang from texts. The first was two sentences in a letter from Mme de Maintenon: ‘The King takes all my time. The rest I give to St Cyr [a foundation]; would that it were all.’ Derrida took off on ‘the difficulty of giving more than all’, especially of a non-commodity, a ‘nothing’ like time. One’s mental hair rose at this ...”

“... Perhaps in a sweetheart ‘democratic’ union prepared in advance by some Bulldog Drummond like David Hart.I read Milne’s book with a faint blush of shame because, not having paid daily attention to the strike and not having much liked Scargill when I met him. I had not disbelieved everything I read about the union funds. Furthermore, some of the bylines ...”

“... some years I had been impressed with the fact that many people I admired then – Martin Luther King, Reinhold Neibuhr, the Kennedys, Isaiah Berlin and Wilson himself – were also dedicated Zionists, totally opposed to anything like a Palestinian side. Wilson himself was a philo-semite, and particularly enthusiastic about scholar-warriors like Yigal ...”

“... with samples of ointments used in Guinea. Sloane also obtained an Asante drum, which, as J.C.H. King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would ...”

“... round and supporting Grey. A few weeks later Lloyd George shocked both A.J. Balfour and the King by suggesting that, as ‘Germany meant war,’ it might ‘be better to have it at once’. In explanation of his volte-face Professor Gilbert writes that for Lloyd George: international understanding was preferable to war ... Yet the principles of ...”

“... preferred. In post-war France, Raymond Aron saw Tocqueville as the great counter-weight to Marx. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd reminded Americans that Tocqueville had feared they would become ‘other-directed’ conformists, incapable of the generosity, independence and energy that democratic government required. In England, Tocqueville’s work was ...”

“... still a strong psychological barrier against its conversion into political opposition. The ‘good king, bad advisers’ idea retained a surprising currency. This view is broadly confirmed by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, who, in The Cuban Revolution, concludes that the Cuban Government retained an undetermined level of popular support. For many citizens, breaking ...”

“... of the subject’s birth, party politics played a substantial role in the appointment of the King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge, who from this point presided over its growth and development. The Liberal Prime Minister Asquith had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John ...”