“... sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn ...”

“... its feckless dependents. The strategy was astoundingly successful in winning over public opinion. George Osborne, the chancellor, evoked a shift worker ‘leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits’. In an interview with the Sun, Duncan Smith more ...”

“... the region probably contained huge oil reserves and that the Royal Navy would require oil, Lloyd George told his French opposite number, Clemenceau, that he wanted Mosul; Clemenceau provisionally agreed. The deal finally went through in 1926 and Syria lost this territory too, as well as the prospect of significant oil wealth; Mosul and its population became ...”

“... been at the time (37) and prettier than she probably ever was (more on this later), is copied from George Richmond’s chalk drawing of 1850. Gaskell – the least distinctive of the three – is represented as much by her dress and slightly haughty stance as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have ...”

“... to Synge to Christian neo-medievalism and the study of ancient Greece. The English scholar George Thomson reading Aeschylus on the Blasket Islands might seem an outlier in Irish Studies, but late Deane was as quick as young Deane to sense possibilities.The previously unpublished essay ‘Emergency Aesthetics’ argues that the distortions of legality ...”

“... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...”

“... his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking ...”

“... on 78 records, 48 of them LPs. The compliments paid to him have been extravagant and impressive. Michael Foot sees resemblances to both Chaplin and Swift, describing him as ‘a comic genius’. The tribute is topped by Robert Graves, for whom Spike is ‘a great genius’. The Monty Python team are cited as finding him not just the original precursor of ...”

“... suppose I could have been a drunk.One used to see Bacon quite often, as he was a regular guest at George Melly’s across the road. The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine ...”

“... untrammelled by international institutions. Trumpeting Bush’s pre-emptive assault on Iraq, Michael Ignatieff recommended in 2003 a new American empire whose ‘grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known’. The United States, Power asserted as Obama’s nominee for US ...”

“... the military (he became a pacifist), the aristocracy (he followed the American writer Henry George in believing in common ownership of land) and the Orthodox Church (which excommunicated him) – increased his stature in revolutionary times, as did the government’s hostility towards him and the fact that he was sufficiently engaged in reality to throw ...”

“... of Turkey joining the European Union’. Speaking at a Nato summit in Turkey in June 2004, George Bush hailed Pamuk’s work as ‘a bridge between cultures’, and claimed it showed that ‘people in other continents and civilisations’ are ‘exactly like you’. Praise from Bush couldn’t have pleased Pamuk, but the speechwriters had done their ...”

“... Broken Home’, written 32 years after ‘Looking at Mummy’: One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed Michael, the Irish setter, head Passionately lowered, led The child I was to a shut door. Inside, Blinds beat sun from the bed. The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise. Under a sheet, clad in taboos Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread, And of a ...”

“... slanted towards the book’s central preoccupation with explaining a slaveholding worldview. Like Michael O’Brien, in his Conjectures of Order (2004), the Genoveses are exasperated with the tendency of historians to dismiss Southerners as anti-intellectual, provincial or crassly materialistic. Unlike O’Brien, they suggest that slavery was the phenomenon ...”

“... at Gitmo. Staff judge advocate Diane Beaver, legal adviser to the Gitmo commanding officer Michael Dunlavey, was asked in October 2002 to draft an opinion on the legality of laxer rules on interrogation. As Sands shows, Beaver was unaware that Jay Bybee and John Yoo, senior figures in the OLC, had already written a 50-page memo advising that harsher ...”