“... death. I first met him in 1968 when Patrick Garland brought him backstage with Princess Margaret after Forty Years On. A friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she ...”

“... refers in particular to the way Ramsey’s work anticipates that of Kuhn, Dummett, Nozick and D.K. Lewis. The paper he singles out as ‘the one from which we still have most to learn’ is ‘General Propositions and Causality’, one of the ‘Last Papers’, It deals with the distinction between a scientific law and a merely accidentally true ...”

“... neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It is 1985, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, the beginning of the end of the welfare state in which Lou, like so many in the postwar country, had invested her dreams. Perhaps, EastEnders suggests, this might be the real reason things are going ...”

“... In the mid-1950s, when Murphy’s Law wasn’t yet widely known under that name, Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, reflecting on the political and administrative troubles afflicting him, suggested that ‘a new law of knowledge’ be recognised and called Strauss’s Law after him: ‘If anything bad can happen, it probably will.’ At the time, Strauss was ...”

“... poetry.) ‘Autobiography involves the heart and the head, the body remembers itself as well,’ Lewis Warsh wrote, reviewing A Serial Biography in 1977 (eight years after publication). Autobiography, how the writer stands in relation to his work, is the whole matter. Poets have to find a way to factor immediate perceptions, half-thoughts, the trash and ...”

“... process for handling federal clemency applications and, in the words of the American lawyer Margaret Colgate, ‘enjoyed a final unencumbered opportunity to reward friends, bless strangers and settle old scores’. On his last day in office, 20 January 2001, Clinton signed pardon warrants for 141 individuals and commuted the sentences of another ...”

“... I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen found their way to Gordon Square, along with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, when the orphaned Stephens set up house there in 1904. But he was not a hero. At the 1903 retrospective of his work Vanessa and Virginia decided that ‘some of his work, indeed most of it, is quite childlike.’ A break with the past had been ...”

“... bent not evident before. What, then, did Muybridge learn about photography in 1860s England, where Lewis Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron were at work? Nothing from them: no portraits by him, no costumed figure studies, no static legendary fantasies. He may have learned the process itself from a manual, or an unnamed ...”

“... course began skipping about the horizon.’ As ever, Alice, like the girl who shared her name in Lewis Carroll’s novels, relished the possibilities of resistant literalism for its power to take the strange philosophies and practices of others to the brink, from which extremity life began to look impossible, absurd, liveable and funny.Scene ...”

“... Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for ...”

“... the Western European welfare state was a harbinger of totalitarianism. These economists see Mrs Margaret Thatcher as the leading politician of contemporary times – a view which, at least until recently, was fashionable in all Soviet reform circles. Alec Nove, British Sovietology’s doyen, has noted that both Nikolai Petrakov, Gorbachev’s economic ...”

“... was great, but seemed neither so great nor so significant as the gap between both of them and Margaret Thatcher’s Tories, who came to power after Wilson withdrew his party’s support for Labour in Westminster. Scottish nationalism didn’t appear to be about the separation of Scotland from the UK so much as one aspect of a global struggle for ...”

“... should not really be discouraging to anybody over the age of 18.’ It was easy to argue, as Lewis Mumford did, that Jacobs’s lack of interest in poverty and the realities of slum life was the result of romanticism, that she was what would later be called a ‘gentrifier’, a middle-class incomer dazzled by the big city and making it her own. In one ...”

“... the public career, in Notes for a New Culture, Blake was alluded to only as a source for Wyndham Lewis. Vorticist prose, Ackroyd claims, ‘closely resembles that of William Blake; there is even a prose poem in Blast, entitled Hamp, which draws heavily upon Blake’s prophetic books.’ Blake (and Bunyan) ‘were both convinced that their work derived from a ...”