“... and lift her down again in the morning. But however demanding or at times demeaning her duties may have been, she already had, as she puts it, ‘years of good practice for the role’. When it came to tantrums, eccentricity and outrageous demands, Princess Margaret had nothing on Colin Tennant. At the heart of Glenconner’s account of her friendship with ...”

“... social spectrum while maintaining one’s own status and dignity. ‘The definition of Civility may be thus understood,’ one 17th-century commentator wrote: ‘it is a science for the right understanding [of] our selves, and true instructing how to dispose all our words and actions in their proper and due places.’ It would ‘conciliate and procure the ...”

“... learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the ...”

“... side. My father advised caution: ‘Best not to have too many illusions; the anti-imperialists may not have been as solid as you think.’ Both my mother and my father broke politically with the family, and became communists. My father was very active in the party, which delayed their wedding a bit. My grandfather refused to allow her to marry a communist ...”

“... did about his job, it was one he enjoyed and which he did exceptionally well. The students may have been intimidated by him but he was popular with his staff and particularly with the women. Mary Judd, the librarian at the issue desk at Hull, thought that ‘most women liked him more than most men because he could talk to a woman and make her feel ...”

“... matter of vocabulary and of languages; even in his grammatical address, Stevens is unique. A poem may be argumentative or instructive or strictly imaginary, but it comes couched in the interrogative or the imperative. Even the punctuation is picturesque. When is the reader ever hectored or harangued the way he is by Stevens? Perhaps only as a child by some ...”

“... wants to borrow money from the Russians). It knows that whatever effect all these things may have on Russia, Putin and Medvedev are on the case. Medvedev is shown a lot on television, about as much as Putin, and usually just before him in each newscast. He is young, in his early forties, but surprisingly lethargic. He’s managed to pick up the Putin ...”

“... interest in the ‘adventure spirit of the young’. Discussing the ways that farming and herding may have spread across Mesolithic Europe, he suggests that this spread was ‘embedded in a system of social values, enshrining the belief that young men could only gain social status by leading colonising expeditions’. The distance they could cover from home ...”

“... sometimes asked by the established white congregation to worship elsewhere. The Church of England may well have thereby denied itself the new energy it needed to reverse its decline; rejected Irish Catholics simply set about building churches of their own. Delaney notes the ‘piquancy’ of the moment in 1960 when the Catholic community of Tollington Park in ...”

“... reluctance’ to talk about herself. She apologises in advance for telling a story that may ‘seem like something out of a novel’, and protests that she is well aware that ‘a woman’s glory lies in not giving rise to gossip.’ Pericles said as much in his funeral oration of 431 BCE as reported by Thucydides, but seldom can that bit of wisdom ...”

“... that of the spirit of a symphony. A salient example of the life helping with the interpretation may be provided by a faultline running through both the early masterpiece, the Tractatus, and the late classic, the Investigations. In each, problems are presented, and then what look like arguments, theses and explanations. But in both cases these expositions ...”

“... of India’ or ‘an Indo-Aryan language’. One of the more scholarly sites speculates that it may indeed be more than one language, because its significant dia-lect variations have not yet been thoroughly analysed. Ghosh’s separation of Bhojpuri from Hindustani has a polemical aspect, and sets it apart as a ‘minority’ language at one remove from the ...”

“... sorcery, such as manuals of charms or collections of poisonous toads and powders’. By the end of May, ‘he had no such evidence.’ But the trial did not end there. He continued to pursue a ‘confession’. A confrontation on 26 July revealed the limits of von Gülchen’s authority. He summoned all those who thought Schmieg had poisoned Fessler, though ...”

“... lung: spittle settling upon the nutsedge Like almost everything else in Powell, such bleak places may be rescued for the imagination by sex, in the same moments that stamp them as frightening: here I inhaled first plum blossoms and took the yellowjacket stings saying ‘sticks, I live in the sticks, don’t drive me home I’ll sleep instead on your rug, be ...”

“... responsibility for winning a second war. When Churchill did invite him into the war cabinet in May 1940, however, he refused, perhaps partly out of pique that the nation had turned to Churchill rather than him, and thereafter gave the strong impression that he was expecting Churchill to fail, at which point there would have to be a negotiated ...”