“... who dissipated the popularity of the throne created by his father, allowed the constitutional power of the crown to be eroded by unscrupulous politicians, and brought the royal family into a disrepute from which it was rescued only by the virtuous reign of his niece Victoria and her husband Prince Albert.’ He therefore decided to take ‘a more balanced ...”

“... the world, the self risks falling outside the frame of its own representations. It is the dynamic power behind the whole process, but one which it is hard to figure there. The human subject becomes the blindspot at the centre of the picture, the absent cause of the world’s coming to presence. For the Modernists, this is a problem which is resolvable only by ...”

“... in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser (Henry Clay), the Godlike Daniel (Daniel Webster), the Great Commoner (Bryan), the Plumed Knight (James G. Blaine) and, most popular of them all, Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president (1829-37) was his war against the ...”

“... Mostly, however, his cheerful storytelling offered a welcome relief from the heritage diet of Henry VIII, Hitler and Winston Churchill. Unlike his fellow broadcasters, Hunt wears his politics on his sleeve. Although there are few traces now of the spirit of 1997, two refrains persist. One is the call for a moral base to politics: the idea that the liberal ...”

“... by subtle gradations, in the course of the wars. Desperate conflict with a fervent revolutionary power, which threatened to loose a rabble of ‘levelling sans-culottes’ on every country in Europe, gave way within the first few years to war with a military junta. Eventually Britain found itself in a protracted struggle against an alien despot who had ...”

“... of art, is never to be measured in terms of honesty or accuracy or up-to-dateness – only by the power of the preserved fiction to put up-to-dateness back into the bruising flow of time. Nash’s anxiety – and the impression grew on me, the longer I spent at Tate Britain’s retrospective (until 5 March), that his painting was shadowed by constant ...”

“... illustration of the law of unintended consequences. The pro-Israeli forces, and thinkers such as Henry Kissinger, have been saying for years that Eisenhower should have sided with the British and French. And Caspar Weinberger once gave an interview to the Washington Post in which he blamed the debacle on the then Labour Government’s refusal to stand and ...”

“... to the ethos of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as ...”

“... New Mother’ (1882) it gets out of hand in an odd and sinister way. Although the art and the power of the tale are never compromised one feels that the author is quite scared herself by the djinn which has come out of the bottle. The horror is about something trivial but irrevocable: a reversal of the normal fairy-tale pattern in which resourcefulness or ...”

“... and a patron of actors, was destined to be in touch with Shakespeare: reputedly the son of Henry VIII, he was also, I notice, the keeper of the woman claimed by A.L. Rowse (after Fraser’s book came out) as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The ballads collected by Walter Scott contain wonderful praise – together with much that is more wonderful – of ...”

“... are among those present. So is Cromwell. And the General Introduction remains angry about ‘the power of the English canonical tradition to absorb a great deal of writing that, from a different point of view, can be reclaimed for the Irish tradition’. (Presumably not Cromwell.) But ‘the Irish tradition’, when monolithically conceived, has not always ...”

“... something which will help it circumvent copyright restrictions. The daunting amount of computer power required to reproduce colour paintings and the array of contextual matter is not generally available outside central institutional facilities. This is not a study aid for sixth-formers. Given a choice between the Chadwyck-Healey Rossetti texts in their raw ...”

“... life is seen as a reader and a woman with a need to write, who revels in language and fears its power to generalise and distort. Miriam is a passionate reader, quick to see what is best in a writer, excitable, greedy for ideas, but always, finally, dismayed. So that Henry James, who is present and parodied in Pilgrimage ...”

“... in 20th-century America has been Saul Bellow, who stands in relation to this theme rather as Henry James did in relation to the impact of Europe on American consciousness. The mourning of old Europe (Europe before the slaughter) and old America (America before Burger King), and the attempt to establish a continuity between these manageable, familial ...”

“... A stab of sorrow.     ‘I don’t like this fucking city,’ he growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an obelisk, and said: ‘Why do they have a prick but no cunt? You have enough fucking feminists in this country – why don’t they protest? Why don’t they insist on erecting a cunt, in memory of – I ...”