“... might be there, though, taking a few notes in the corner. Not without a moral struggle, Stevenson said yes. The partnership would last until Lloyd George’s death 32 years later. Stevenson acted as his private secretary through the second half of his chancellorship, his periods at the Ministry of Munitions and the War Office, his six years as prime ...”

“... it is shift for yourself.’ Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the myopic boy who grew up during that trip, said of Scott that he never met a man who cried so easily; later, in The Worst Journey in the World, he wrote, with stunning clarity: ‘I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a ...”

“... involving 184,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers and their families. It is usually said to have begun in early March 1984 when miners walked out of Cortonwood colliery in South Yorkshire after it was announced that the pit was to be closed along with nineteen others across Britain. Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, decided to use the ...”

“... right simile here, because sometimes he was lunching judges) and tried to remember everything they said. Taking notes was out of the question: ‘nothing would be more likely to cause an informant to clam up.’ He was happy to be recognised as ‘the Lone Wolf of Fleet Street’ and to spurn friendship with colleagues and rivals. His personality had a ...”

“... Powell offered members and voters a politically potent vision of a Conservative patria in a way Edward Heath never did. At many points during the last 150 years, Tory backbenchers and members have been frustrated by the inability of their leaders to provide the inspirational direction they crave, though they have often struggled to define what that might ...”

“... never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare,’ Pitt is reported to have said. The men who had most to gain from the idea that subjects should judge the value of political institutions for themselves would never be able to afford Godwin’s book.If the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t count as sedition, what did? When the ...”

“... in pretending to help people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold ...”

“... species to have any control whatsoever over how we evolve,’ they write. As it happens, Fuller said the same in 1966: ‘For the first time in the history of the world, man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of ...”

“... and Professions in Gujarat’, and looked back on his earlier collaboration with the likes of Edward Moor in exposing such practices as female infanticide, which he claimed was particularly common among the Jadeja Rajputs of Gujarat. Walker, like many others, was inclined increasingly as his career progressed to see Indian society as made up not of ...”

“... firebrand Edmund Ek’. ‘What tiresome and laborious folly it is to write empty tomes,’ Borges said, ‘to expound in five hundred pages on an idea that one could easily propound orally in a few minutes. Better is pretending that the books exist already and offering a summary or commentary.’ Something like this occurs in Flann O’Brien’s The Third ...”

“... and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western civilisation. For Said, the West’s representation of the Orient is an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialism. The Oriental is ...”

“... their enchantment. Total immersion was Rothko’s intention. ‘They are not pictures,’ he said of his murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. ‘I have made a place.’ He aimed to make such places in a dining room at Harvard and in the octagonal Rothko Chapel in Houston; few artists have been more obsessive, more imperious, more obnoxious ...”

“... She was excitedly preparing for a visit from the poet, philosopher and ‘saint in sandals’, Edward Carpenter. Born and Daniell, two of the half-dozen ‘puzzled idealists’ whose lives Sheila Rowbotham follows in Rebel Crossings, were members of the Bristol Socialist Society, a body that aspired to ‘the attainment of the higher ideals of ...”

“... lady, an art-world insider, a Proust fanatic and a New Woman. At her funeral, Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘Florine made no concessions of any kind to any person or situation.’ But she was also great fun. When she finished a painting, she gave it a tea party, inviting a (carefully curated) collection of guests.Writing about Stettheimer in 1980, Linda Nochlin ...”

“... there was one devell too many amongst them.’ They explained the situation to the audience, and said they ‘could go no further with this matter’. The audience promptly fled – ‘every man hastened to be first out of dores’ – and the players spent the night in unaccustomed prayer and meditation. For some, such anecdotes suggest, Faustus was a ...”