“... abdication’. His gratification that this framework accommodates the findings of his contributors may be somewhat overdone. His second synthesis is a broader one which includes the lesser. It has to do with the role of the landed men in English life in a much more general sense, and represents a current reinter-pretational convergence. It is that the landed ...”

“... we had determined weeks before the Demidenko affair reached its final phase to give the prize to Richard Flanagan, for his magical-realist investigation of Tasmania’s history, The Death of a River Guide. Helen Demidenko published her novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper, in 1994, when she was 23. She claimed that, like the narrator of her book, she had a ...”

“... He was a finely ironic self-dramatist, too, scheduling the first trial of Airship No. 2 for 11 May 1899 – the Feast of the Ascension. Paris, unsurprisingly, adored him. In 1901, at the height of his fame, a newspaper described him as the city’s ‘god’, and noted the homophony between his name and those of Porthos and Athos. Milliners created a ...”

“... to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present. Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an ...”

“... Christian scheme of fall and redemption, the biological transmission of original sin. Although we may be familiar with Hobbes’s materialism and Spinoza’s reductive assimilation of God to nature, the argument of the third major heretic of the mid-17th century tends to be forgotten: in Prae-Adamitae (1655), Isaac La Peyrère, a Huguenot from ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... of state for communities and local government, tweeted a description of the multimillionaire Richard Desmond as a ‘puppet master’ (Desmond is Jewish), he was not sacked for the antisemitic trope; it was deemed sufficient that he deleted the tweet and apologised when asked to. Meanwhile, it appears that Corbynism’s excitable and often clumsy ...”

“... immoraliste, E.T.A. (Amadeus) Hoffmann, Byron, Kierkegaard (the aesthetic v. the ethical) and Richard Strauss, to Shaw and Eric Linklater. The sociological aspects of the ever-interesting topic are not neglected. Taking his tip from the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of ...”

“... Cukor, who preceded Fleming on Oz, had left. Vidor replaced Fleming. (The first director on Oz was Richard Thorpe.) Rushdie’s argument becomes somewhat confused on the question of auteur credit. He makes much of geometric and other compositional details in the Kansas sequences, neglects to mention that these were directed by Vidor, yet claims the film has no ...”

“... At least I assume this is the case, since we hear enough about it. The book is constructed in the Richard Rogers style, with all the functional background stuff displayed ostentatiously on the outside. There is a Thirlwellesque narrator, a writer who lives in East London, drinks a lot of coffee, and has recently ‘got back into the practice of dope’. He ...”

“... partcomposed of vitreous ash, silica,ferrous oak gall,resentment, griefs, squabbles and squallsit may yet enthrallthe plane’s state-of-the-artcombustion chamber, clogging the engine with molten glassthe way a poem may yet stop the heart.One vanishing plume, or pall of dust, leads to another dust scrawl, and then to ...”

“... rue des Archives in the Marais – in the shadow of the Centre Pompidou, which he designed with Richard Rogers in the early 1970s. At RPBW Genoa, on the coast just to the west of the city, meetings happen at a round table, with no notes taken: bad ideas are encouraged, because they’ll immediately be replaced by better ones as the collective musters its ...”

“... Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative path to editorial favour, for A.V. Dicey’s academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than ...”

“... in the 1850s, of a ‘milieu intérieur’: ‘All of the vital mechanisms, however varied they may be, have always one goal, to maintain the uniformity of the conditions of life in the internal environment . . . The stability of the internal environment is the condition for the free and independent life.’Our bodies can only maintain homeostasis within ...”

“... the maiden speech for which he was instantly awarded the Garter. When I joined, I discovered that Richard Adrian is quite right: it is like a prep school. There are any number of corridors down which to get lost. Nobody tells you how to find the Gents, and you’re too shy to ask. The rituals are as arcane to the newcomer as they are familiar to the old ...”