“... ultimate vindication, however, came with the advent of the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.’ Roger Scruton, by contrast, is writing in a different register in Enoch at 100 when he laments the loss of ‘philosophical acumen’ that led to the anti-socialist truths of the free market being reiterated ‘far less ...”

“... of the human family’ or simply as ‘They’, or ‘Them’. The writer who does do that is Margaret Oliphant, whom Miller doesn’t mention, and whose novel Miss Marjoribanks (1866) is surely the most interesting and entertaining example of a woman writing about men in the 19th century.The novel tells the story of Miss Marjoribanks, and of her ...”

“... just a ploy to get attention. Attention was certainly in short supply, but in later pictures – Margaret Evans Pregnant, for example, or the 1970 portrait of Andy Warhol, stripped to the waist, showing the scars of his 1968 gunshot wounds, or in any of the other pictures where people have taken off their clothes – you know that if you weren’t shown the ...”

“... to bring it up to the average among similar countries. Over the course of the 2010s that share rose in most countries, but in the UK it fell. In particular, the share of GDP spent on investment in healthcare (new hospitals, new beds etc), which in 2010 was around the average among ‘peer’ countries ...”

“... there’s no chance it’s going to get better. I won’t have a warm retrospective feeling about Margaret Thatcher. I don’t see Reagan or Nixon in a new perspective with the passage of time. And I still loathe my wicked stepmother. This last is what needs acknowledging, because as I read Mary Whitehouse’s letters, everything about her, except the trim ...”

“... Revolution – the Terror and the Napoleonic conquests – was wearing off. In July 1830 Paris rose, expelling the Bourbon dynasty. Revolution became terrifyingly contagious: Belgium rebelled and won its independence; violent protest broke out in parts of Italy and Switzerland, and in November the Poles launched a huge but vain insurrection against the ...”

“... belief, encouraged by meetings in the United States with anthropological writers such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, was that the outer world of familial and social patterns was as important for each individual as the inner world, that the intersection of the two was the crux of character. Hence his writings on Native American child-rearing, on ...”

“... Corelli and Ethel M. Dell, but not Glyn. Two thick Companions to Literature, one of them edited by Margaret Drabble, give her 13 lines between them. Chambers Biographical Dictionary snortingly dismisses the Glyn output as ‘nonsensical, high-falutin, faulty in construction and ungrammatical’, qualities which were never a bar to popular ...”

“... in public – as once at a royal levee, resplendent ‘in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons’. What energy he had, what persistence, what lapses and arrests. By the end of his tumultuous life he had at least become the grey eminence saluted in the title conferred on the last of the ...”

“... which Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore (and, slightly earlier, Gertrude Stein) rose up, angry and ready to do battle with mediocrity. Carr describes a pretty mediocre Philadelphia a hundred years ago, ‘pink and drab’ and hidebound. H.D. found it disconcerting after a bucolic childhood in the Moravian town of Bethlehem, further north ...”

“... pieces of naughtiness and in Craig Raine’s image of an excited watering-can and a peculiar rose – and this is because, more than anything, the blue verse tradition is about being in control – of your verse-form as well as your feelings. There is no room in this tradition for a poem about sexual compulsion such as Ted Hughes’s ‘A Childish ...”

“... his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose through the ranks to become precentor, and spent his dotage working on the cathedral’s medieval manuscripts.In the course of his research, Bannister struck up a correspondence with Montague Rhodes James. Though he is now more famous for his ghost ...”

“... textured with gold, set off against deep blues and greens. In the third painting in the Briar Rose series (1885-90) – a rendering of the Sleeping Beauty tale – the princess’s comatose maids (mostly their feet) are hazily reflected in a shimmering golden floor. (Burne-Jones was good at reflections – reflections of reflections of reflections of ...”

“... of the population and the financial demands of the government’s creditors. The price of food rose by 25 per cent over 2022 and 2023, and hasn’t come back down again. The energy price cap, set by Ofgem to limit unit costs, more than tripled in the year following the invasion of Ukraine; it then fell again, but never returned to 2021 levels. Rents in the ...”

“... neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It is 1985, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, the beginning of the end of the welfare state in which Lou, like so many in the postwar country, had invested her dreams. Perhaps, EastEnders suggests, this might be the real reason things are going ...”