“... unfolding storyline, costs millions of dollars per episode to make, and seems largely intended for home-recording or DVD viewers, who will trouble to watch it in sequence. It is on billboards and the sides of buses everywhere and the puff interviews are inescapable (its network, AMC, has never had a hit show to publicise before). The first series ran on BBC4 ...”

“... Marxist Group members led to the party’s implosion soon afterwards. Sillars found a new home in the SNP, and by the late 1980s his idea of ‘independence in Europe’ had become the keystone of the party’s strategy for a reassuringly non-separatist form of independence. (By a further irony, Sillars has in the past decade reverted to a Lexit ...”

“... and Geoffrey Stephenson under the title Suspicion and Silence.* But since my disagreement with the Lord Chief Justice is on record in Hansard, I leave it there for now. The second topic, which connects to the first through the notion of fairness in how evidence is obtained, is the ‘fruit of the poisoned tree’. There is no disagreement that a conviction ...”

“... it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than a home and a country: it was an inspiration. At no period in our history has the realisation of national unity been keener, the consciousness of national identity more intense.’Countless historical novels, costume dramas and schoolbooks of the early 20th century ...”

“... to answer. Part of his extraordinary success can be put down to luck: he was good-looking, and a lord, and he wrote in English, a language which was already, for non-literary reasons, on the way up. But Byron also had the right gifts, a quick, strong intellect and a forceful turn of phrase. He had an unprecedented flair for getting his sexual presence into ...”

“... while the capacity of modern statesmen to live up to them has undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in ...”

“... Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was delighted with Master and Commander (1969). It ‘leapfrogged ...”

“... obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – ‘in finance’, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised ...”

“... wife, Andromache, calls her maids to heat water for ‘a hot bath for Hektōr when he came home from the fighting –/unaware, in her folly, that far from all baths he’d been slain’. Inside the walls of Troy there is no problem about the presence of baths or any other amenity: it is a well-built domestic space where there is weaving and warm ...”

“... own party. Like Bagehot’s opinions of the Second Reform Act, Dicey’s interventions against Home Rule form a tactically convenient stick for Mount to wave at writers whose real offence lies elsewhere – tarnishing the aura of monarchy, and opening the door to popular sovereignty. Jennings, by contrast, requires no side-gambit. Mount taxes him directly ...”

“... alienation from his new – that is, acquired – and, in Conrad’s rather special case, admired home. His friends all said of Conrad that he was very contented with the idea of being English, even though he never lost his heavy Polish accent and his quite peculiar moodiness, which was thought to be very un-English. Yet the moment one enters his writing the ...”

“... houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be lunatic asylums. Stockbridge, peaceful home of Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, who gave Middle America what it wanted. Stockbridge, where Melville said something unmemorable to Hawthorne. Stockbridge, the site of the family grave – known, weirdly, as ‘the Pie’ – of the Sedgwick ...”

“... folk music – the Marxist line in the 1930s. Waller was also wary of false consciousness. ‘Lord, there’s one of those Georgian Arabians,’ he exclaims with feigned surprise as Assistant Sheik Herman Autrey starts his trumpet solo. ‘Mercy! But watch out for them camels!’ warns the fastidious Waller. At the conclusion of ‘Spring Cleaning ...”

“... In 1954, at the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts (‘fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself ...”

“... mount, while it pursuesThings unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.The Aonian mount is Helicon, home to the nine Muses of ancient Greece, so the gesture at once locates Milton’s poem within the classical epic tradition and announces its aim to surpass it. Ambitious words, though their presumption is tempered by their illocutionary force; Milton is not ...”