“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... the words of the statute say less than they appeared to. The minority, of which Sumption was one, held it couldn’t – or needn’t – be done. For the majority, Lord Carnwath applied the principle that an unlawful decision was no decision and so was unprotected by the exclusionary clause. But neither of these is what the case was really about. The ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... It is hard for a reader in the mid-20th century to grasp that Podsnappish views could have been held in an open-eyed spirit by intelligent men and women in the Victorian period. The 20th century has a way of foisting its own kind of view on those Victorians who are perceived as intelligent. Hence the extremely improbable speculation that in Middlemarch ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”

“... appropriate to pictorial meaning. It is an account that runs counter to a number of views widely held today of what it is for a picture to have meaning ... Another way of putting the account that I am against is to say that it assimilates the kind of meaning that pictures have to the kind of meaning that language has ... What kind of account of pictorial ...”

“... British justice was so rigid that when his term as governor ended in 1831, wild celebrations were held around Sydney Harbour as his ship sailed out between the heads. Malouf’s fictional Michael Adair, as an Irish officer (from the landed gentry, to be sure; but Irish nonetheless) in a British regiment, has of necessity internalised a received system of ...”

“... But she brought her head up, wobbling, and she raised her arms, raised them and spread them and held them out. And then she staggered toward me, just as a car pulled into the yard.   ‘Guhguh-guhby ... kiss guhguh-guh –’   I brought an uppercut up from the floor. There was a sharp crack! and her whole body shot upward, and came down in a ...”

“... with the vasty deep. By 1404, English authority throughout Wales was in tatters. Glyn Dŵr held his first parliament in May and not only explored alliances with Scotland and Ireland, but sent diplomatic missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... could expect such (unpaid) hyperbole? Unlike Doubleday, Random House was old-fashioned and still held to the ideals of the ‘mighty generation’. Epstein found the firm congenial and it was his home for most of his publishing career, although he also found other outlets for his exuberant energies. In December 1962, a long strike began at the New York ...”

“... underway at the time, and Lois and Charles were arrested. Over the next few days, they were held in various places, including the central police station and an inconspicuous house which the Communists had taken over as a secret jail. The Orrs’ strange friend Tioli had already tried to alert them that they were in danger. On 16 June, it seems, Charles ...”

“... but there was no further looting. Of the 15,000 objects stolen only 6000 have been returned or held by customs agents abroad. These losses are on a scale well beyond previous thefts from museums. The offices and archives of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH), which administers all antiquities sites and museums in Iraq, were looted too, and ...”

“... During a summer school on the theme of parties and democracy held at the European University Institute in Florence last September, the talk turned to political corruption, as it often does when politics students visit Italy. The Telegraph’s principal revelations in the MPs’ expenses scandal had appeared some while before, but the summer school students were in any case more intrigued by the doings of Silvio Berlusconi and the daily stories of political chicanery in La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera ...”

“... to the truth after ages of error, but by the gradual modification of doctrines previously held; and will at some future date, unless thinking stops, be themselves no less modified. He had started on a train of thought that he would come to regard as ‘my life’s work’ – the attempt, as he put it, to ‘bring about a rapprochement between ...”