“... be a thriller’s starting point, and Clegg doesn’t work too hard to erase the dark question mark looming over the explosion. The bare description of the circumstances – ‘the old stove, gas leaking through the night and filling, like liquid, the first floor of the house’ – doesn’t rule out the possibility of an accident but also suggests the ...”

“... of citizens. The polis walls serve an obvious defensive and protective purpose, but they also mark the frontier between citizens and enemies, the threshold between politics and the wild. Criminals had made themselves enemies of the state, so the Athenians cast their remains out of the city after execution, just as Londoners took the corpses of provincials ...”

“... with the much weaker East German currency being accorded parity with the strong West German mark. The immediate appeal of such a policy to East German voters was obvious, and the proposal was also supported by Brandt. In the longer term, however, as Lafontaine then argued, currency parity would lead to industry becoming uncompetitive in East ...”

“... the differences superior information can impose. This doesn’t mean that editors should simply mark up the texts of other editors, only that the scope for sensible change is less than it pleases them to believe. Bowers was right to warn his colleagues that the incredible refinement of bibliographical technique in our time might not succeed in making many ...”

“... feature of the Liberian civil war, which lasted from December 1989 until the election of Charles Taylor as President in July 1997: Some people assert that fighters were encouraged to carry out such practices by their ritual specialists, while others may have simply improvised behaviour on the basis of a received belief that this would make them ...”

“... it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t ...”

“... out of Tennyson country into the land of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Or Elizabeth Bowen, or Elizabeth Taylor. Mutual marital embarrassment – how un-Victorian and un-Tennysonian – is one of the little things those novelists are so good at conveying. The most absorbing aspect of Ann Thwaite’s altogether fascinating study is not so much Emily Tennyson ...”

“... of Hume and his successors. This might well be true. How human beings imagine themselves does mark very deeply the ways in which they try to live; and, even on the most alienated view, the ways in which they try to live have a large, if uneven impact on the ways in which they succeed in living. Cultural causality is certainly extravagantly ...”

“... a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no ...”

“... policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting elected. Gladstone ...”

“... Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked O’Sullivan, he paused for a moment then replied: ‘Barack Obama.’ O’Sullivan is widely acknowledged to be ...”

“... page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost purposefully unprofessional.After the show, ...”

“... and alarmed – the team at Givenchy in Paris when he arrived there, and his tailoring skills mark the wonderfully elegant suits and outfits on show in the first rooms of the exhibition. After Savile Row, he went to work for theatrical costumiers, and continued to take off into different eras and places, reprising Jacobite jabots, tartans and sashes (in ...”

“... Kocka, who saw the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49 as the turning point when, as A.J.P. Taylor quipped, German history failed to turn. While in other Western and Central European nations industrialisation and the defeat of the landed aristocracy were accompanied by the triumph of bourgeois liberalism, in Germany aristocracy and authoritarianism ...”

“... was voiced by Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: material abundance becomes a mark of status and so casts down the poor. Another is that commercialism excites a servile pandering to buyers. In 1766 the Charleston Tribune noted that ‘luxury naturally creates want, and that want, whether artificial or real, has a tendency to make men venal ...”