“... On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford reports that Freud told him that when Andrew Parker-Bowles protested about the way his stomach protruded, Freud ‘thought I’d better emphasise it more’. Freud​ met Caroline Blackwood at a party in 1949 when she was 18. Three years later, he painted her portrait. Just as John Minton had ...”

“... in the over-hasty publication of the Selected Letters and, more, by the misunderstandings of Andrew Motion’s Life. The Letters left unexplained the poet’s own characteristic masochistic self-contempt and self-derision, the assumption of attitudes tried out on suitable correspondents but not always held truly or permanently by the writer; the equally ...”

“... words, we are not nearly as far out of the EU as we like to boast (or lament).The idea of the ‘noble lie’ has an ancient parentage. Karl Popper points out in The Open Society that it won’t do to pretend that Plato was merely talking about ‘a bold invention’ – to quote Francis Cornford’s formulation – or a ‘necessary myth’, as it is also ...”

“... The boys worked together on a student newspaper and in student politics. His younger brother, Andrew, took time out from his own media career to work as an adviser to Gordon when he first became an MP. These were the relationships he cherished: permanent bonds with people who will look out for you regardless. The ones he mistrusted were those based on ...”

“... complete general, strict in his discipline, wary in conduct, fearless in action … of a modest, noble, generous disposition’. The narrator also frequently praises Defoe’s hero, Gustavus Adolphus, who is meant by association to remind the reader of his supreme hero, William of Orange. As Novak points out, Defoe noted several times that Gustavus Adolphus ...”

“... planners of tower blocks as deluded, but the utopian dreams of those house builders look pretty noble to me, perhaps because I grew up around them and never saw them as being so otherworldly. We are too quick to denounce them when the housing alternatives in big cities are so miserable.In 1979, a third of people in the UK lived in council housing, but after ...”

“... breakfast, not with strong Cuban coffee, but with watery tea in a glass (it was Chesterton, that noble connoiseur, who said that tea, like everything else that comes from the Orient, becomes poisonous if made strong). Cherished daydream turns into nightmare: Morpheus is now amorphous. In ‘The Lovers of the Izmailovo Forest’ the Poet’s only haven in ...”

“... Flannery O’Connor, Chinua Achebe, Georges Bernanos, Kate O’Brien, Maurice Gee, Brian Moore and Andrew O’Hagan, have made a big effort. Others, such as James Joyce, have managed to weave religion into a larger fabric, with all the sheer drama of faith and doubt, and have managed also to include the comic possibilities of dogma and ritual to liven up their ...”

“... has serious qualms about the tone of Siegfried’s Funeral Music but Daniel Barenboim thinks it ‘noble’, on what grounds can we adjudicate the differences?The difficulty we have tying non-musical meanings back to the notes on the page has a direct bearing on the fraught question of the association of Wagner’s works with National Socialism and, in my ...”

“... services, imposed from Whitehall.’ Two months later, the new health secretary, the Conservative Andrew Lansley, announced his plans for a top-down reconfiguration of England’s NHS services, imposed from Whitehall. The patient whom Porter was about to operate on was a 60-year-old woman from the Wirral with a complex prosthesis in one leg, running from her ...”

“... and the Reverend William Whewell, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, that it was just as ‘noble’ a conception of God that he worked through divinely instituted natural laws as that he used his powers directly to create each species. Four years after the Origin appeared, Kingsley wrote that ‘God’s greatness, goodness and perpetual care I never ...”

“... as so many impediments to the free movement of factors of production. As a leading authority, Andrew Moravcsik, explains, ‘the neo-liberal bias of the EU, if it exists, is justified by the social welfare bias of current national policies,’ which ‘no responsible analyst believes can be maintained’ – ‘European social policy exists only in the ...”

“... as one of his own messengers.‘For all the post-triumph revolutionary lyricism about the “noble peasantry” of the Sierra Maestra,’ Anderson notes caustically, ‘it is clear that, in these early times, Fidel and his men were very much on alien ground. They neither knew nor understood the hearts and minds of the locals, but relied on Crescencio and ...”

“... not observed in practice, leading to the unforeseen consequence of ‘massive loss of life’.2 Andrew Mango’s acclaimed biography Atatürk (1999) is even more tight-lipped. There we are told that ‘Eastern Anatolia is inhospitable at the best of times,’ and if its Armenians were ‘deported’, it was because they were drawn to the Russians and had ...”