“... who was fussy about what he would or would not eat could scarcely do a prince’s business. As James I instructed his son, ‘your dyet should bee accommodatte to your affaires, & not your affaires to your diet.’ The job of the dietary writer was, therefore, to work within these conventions, fine-tuning them to ensure that courtiers, and those who ...”

“... the worst during the war and were themselves responsible for the appointment of a committee under Lord Fleming to consider their relationship to society and to wartime democracy. The committee’s report was feeble, though some children benefited from the scholarships set up by a few education authorities under its aegis. Doing away with the public ...”

“... assigned to the ‘hedge fund overlord’, the ‘polo-playing playboy millionaire’, the ‘James Bond of the Russian oligarchy’, the ‘French luxury goods tycoon’ (also appearing as the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s ...”

“... old lady’s hands, lying idle in a lap somewhere.1 June. Coming to the end of English Pastoral, James Rebanks’s second volume. It’s harder to read than A Shepherd’s Life, with the central section about the onset of factory farming not easy to take. Thankfully, though, in his own life at any rate the tide turns and Rebanks regains his grip on ...”

“... Keats, he fused genres and wrote verse epistles. There are feisty examples addressed to the poets James Simmons (with whom relations became strained) and Michael Foley. His best-known exercise in this mode is ‘An Open Letter’, which was published as a Field Day pamphlet in 1983. Mildly protesting about the appearance of the word ‘British’ in the title ...”

“... refurbished the prime minister’s Downing Street flat with £112,000 provided by Tory donors, but Lord Geidt, Allen’s successor, found that Johnson had been unaware of where the money had come from. Geidt himself resigned after his decision was subjected to criticism (he wasn’t replaced). Johnson was, however, reprimanded for failing to declare which kind ...”

“... of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the eleven-part code of conduct Schwartz drew up for himself and distributed among his fellow students. They were to read a chapter from Aristotle’s Logic every day, as well as half an hour of Spinoza; to ‘use words as translations of ...”

“... for weeks, walking round the garden listening to the tape and saying the words out loud. 3 May. Lord Browne disgraced largely thanks to the Mail on Sunday and the bribery of a Canadian youth. The newspapers painstakingly explain why we should feel no sympathy for him, but if the Mail chose to target Heinrich Himmler I would tend to be on his side. The young ...”

“... Agreement of April 1987, signed at a secret meeting between Peres and Hussein at the home of Lord Mishcon in London. The agreement envisaged an international conference with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation and negotiations on the basis of Resolutions 242 and 338. Peres read the agreement to Shamir but refused to give him a copy although by now ...”

“... factor, Thomas Wooldridge, who ‘cooked up the occasion’ for Wheatley’s address to Lord Dartmouth. The poem was a turning point in Wheatley’s efforts to gather her poetry in a book. After the first proposal of 1772 came to nothing, the Wheatleys took a different approach. The family collected testimonies, shared poems in manuscript and ...”

“... festoons and sashes and galloons. And yet, while no less a figure of grand respectability than Lord Mountbatten arrayed himself in gems and plumes, a whiff of the ridiculous still clings to these bedizened figures, however powerful. In 1938, in her furious essay Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf denounced peacockery as a display of unearned prerogatives and ...”

“... both. ‘The chapter is perhaps best read as a Hegelian parable, in which the dialectic of the lord and the bondsman [I prefer the old master and slave] is transposed to the struggle of coloniser and colonised.’ Fanon is under the spell of Alexandre Kojève, that crucial interpreter of Hegel for existentialists. ‘“On Violence” tells a story with ...”

“... thereby impressing the congregation (and himself) with his sincerity. Treacher had even heard the Lord’s Prayer delivered in this fashion and found it intolerable and even queasy. But Father Jolliffe, perhaps because of his Catholic leanings, was dry and to the point. ‘Say the word, say the word only’ seemed to be his motto and Treacher added another ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... to whom the book was dedicated: ‘I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb ... Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; – I have heard of Krakens’ (a fabulous Scandinavian sea ...”