“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British social-democratic tradition; still one in which the ...”

“... nimble, complex and graceful, the dance included a move called the tripudium, three stamps of the foot so heavy that Catullus worried that if they performed the dance at Colonia they might demolish its bridge. The same triple stamping was included in the rites of the Arval Brethren revived by Augustus, and always thereafter including the reigning monarch ...”

“... and then introduced a new form, a three-step line characterised by what he called the ‘variable foot’. The poems that resulted were far more abstract, and more ruminative, than anything he had written before: this style must have seemed to Williams as a means of avoiding the excessive dependence on description, and on other people’s voices, which had ...”

“... home has left: what would Walser say to walking back with him in the night, it’s two hours on foot? Walser promptly agrees: The writer then stayed as our guest for a couple of days. Should I say something of his appearance? Well, he doesn’t look the way a reader of his books would imagine him, or a painter paint him. All his books have something ...”

“... my wristwatch and cigarette case – all of which I had given him’.Channon was warned by John Gielgud that his liaison with Rattigan was all too public, while Nigel Birch, a clever, sarcastic Tory MP, teased him about the silk shirt he wore with the embroidered initials ‘TR’. Channon was acquainted with Lord Berners and ‘his crazier ...”

“... marriage and the family’s move from Rotherhithe to Brockley – London still, or just, with one foot in open country rather than river. She kept up with advanced ideas: she wanted to call her second son Oscar, got away with Walter (after Pater), but was confounded when at the age of nine he chose to answer only to his middle name, David. She had gone up in ...”

“... on its behalf, as well as well-connected political insiders: Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter, the Clinton strategist James Carville and, later, the disgraced general Mike Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser. Former US government and intelligence officials were hired to fill executive and advisory roles. In 2009, the ...”

“... Royal Mail postal workers sort it into individual rounds and deliver it by van, bike and on foot. Under the Sandd system, crates of mail are delivered to casual workers’ houses. These workers sort the mail, on whatever flat surface they can find, then deliver it on set days at a time of their choosing. Besides slashing the mail ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John Singer Sargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting ...”

“... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...”

“... ends. All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation bubble’ which could turn at ...”

“... must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect. Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script. One old man and three of his women sleep in the house on Second Street. The City Hall clock whirrs and sputters the prolegomena to the first stroke of six and Bridget’s alarm clock gives a sympathetic skip and click as the ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... of railways into spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the ...”

“... panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he will never be able to ride again, Sainty ‘heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. “Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,” he said.’ From now on, Sainty’s lameness will be the useful badge of his ...”