“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... coffin, with Kenyatta letting them stay and hold on to their farms if they wanted – came when Lord Lambton, about as kosher an aristocrat as you could find in Britain, turned against them over Hola. The puzzle is why they were allowed to get away with it for so long. It was not as if there were no protests in Britain. The British people have never been ...”

“... of mischief (‘it never occurs to you you’ll be rejected’). In interviews, she claimed both James Boswell and Giuseppe Verdi as ancestors; it’s not impossible, with the middle name Boswell and a mother née Verdi, but there’s a whiff of family romance to this self-construction. She wrote little about her mother, though it’s clear their ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of impartiality, reporting Lord Annan’s opinion that Leavis’s treatment was, in MacKillop’s paraphrase, ‘tough, but not unexpected or unjust’. Annan was Provost of King’s and knew the Cambridge system, if that is the word, intimately. But MacKillop also knows it, and, with his ...”

“... the image of the moustachioed bandido, which morphs smoothly into that of the moustachioed drug lord. The association of Mexico with violence takes an even more pernicious form in the minds of repressed intellectuals, who celebrate the everyday mayhem in a poor country with a deplorable judicial system as evidence of some more honest, vital relationship ...”

“... returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. It may seem ‘far-fetched’, Sharpe acknowledges, to connect the ...”

“... growth of tension between court and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary ...”

“... Cocteau, Eugene Berman, Poulenc, Henze, Boulez, Copland, Carlos Chávez, Charles-Albert Cingria, Lord Berners, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Edward James, Kopeikine (Balanchine’s pianist) e tutti quanti – surely reflects his relationship with his brother.’ But the claim that Walsh avoided ‘accurately informed people ...”

“... Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner ...”

“... to give way to interiority: it became a psychic injury, a ‘thorn in the spirit’, as William James put it, an injury done not to the body but to the mind by violence, or by any unspeakable or unassimilable experience. In the 19th century and much of the 20th these mental wounds were understood to be represented in the body by such symptoms as ...”

“... To Sotheby’s where I’m reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen’s Private Secretary. Talking of A Question of Attribution, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether he knew that the ...”

“... The wage-slave works on a thing, but sees his work as alien, because he’s doing it for the lord of industry, who pays him a wage: ‘A definite social relation between men assumes the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.’ ‘That’s the crucial sentence,’ Rose says. I looked it up in my own copy to check I understood it, and found it ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... herself was solitude: ‘Don’t you know you are happiest while I withhold,’ she wrote to Judge Lord in 1878, ‘don’t you know that “No” is the wildest word we consign to language.’ Writing to Austin in 1863, Bowles sent his best to Dickinson with a hint of snark: ‘to the Queen Recluse my especial sympathy – that she has “overcome the ...”