“... voting system, the unelected second chamber, the monarchy etc) and guarantees the right to self-determination of nations within the UK. This will not happen unless there is a grand remonstrance from below. Here the Scottish campaign for independence offers a good model. Tariq Ali After​ the 1979 referendum, which mustered too few ‘Yes’ votes to ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... aesthetic and ethical disposition; violence, and in particular male violence against women; self-harm, especially but not exclusively women’s; and what she pointedly does not call masochism. ‘The mode of violence that gets beneath my skin and really haunts me is not those destructive acts perpetrated by one upon another, for reasons good, bad or ...”

“... out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was so great that Nixon was forced to ...”

“... modern representations, with all their unassimilable detritus, into the singularity of supposedly self-evident identities. If we think of The Island Princess’s ‘Moor priest’ as an ‘imam’, we might all too easily finesse the fact – noted by McManus – that he makes pantheistic references to ‘the gods’ and is addressed as ‘Don Governor’, a ...”

“... the pipes in 1715 and 1745. The real squeeze was in the pocket. Hoppit quotes a feisty diatribe by Robert Freebairn, a prominent Jacobite in 1715 (although he was the queen’s printer), who had to flee to the Continent after the rising was put down:Before the Union we have no Taxes but what were laid on by our own Parliaments, and those very easie, and spent ...”

“... the Ciceronians, whose ‘reform’ of traditional Christian vocabulary he found both pompous and self-defeating. At the same time, he was not comfortable with un-classical usage, and would argue that, if it was possible for the translator of the Bible to correct alien forms with acceptable Latin on some occasions, it ought to be possible to do so thoughout ...”

“... but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent. Richard Goy and Robert Berger, in their respective accounts of the construction of the Cà d’Oro and of Louis XIV’s Louvre, remove ambiguities which hang around the word ‘built’. They ask who made decisions, who paid, and how much, and why each building took this form ...”

“... to an occasional session of sweet silent thought, or even to the consulting of a concordance. Robert Browning, Luria, 1846 – I dedicate this last attempt for the present at Dramatic Poetry to a Great Dramatic Poet: ‘Wishing what I write may be read by his light’: if a phrase originally addressed, by not the least worthy of his contemporaries, to ...”

“... the ‘epicene waif’, Isabelle Eberhardt, who tried to ‘do a Pierre Loti’ in Algeria; and a self-intoxicated Scot, John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, whose speciality was reaching the source of rivers by canoe, even when the source was a turgid swamp (his lecture called ‘Arma Virumque Canoe’, with practical demonstrations, had the mechanics’ institutes ...”

“... man if that seemed fit; then the noble sentiment might actually be pronounced, and not appear self-regarding. I do not mind the evident craving of Kermode to assault the story, only his conception of evidence. When were there no surviving eyewitnesses, pray? The man who brought the cup must have been one, at the time. As to Plutarch, surely Sidney had ...”

“... efforts to unite his realms of Scotland and England, this is only evidence of his desire for ‘self-glorification’. There is, of course, nothing wrong in disliking James I, though I confess to rather a liking for him. The worry is that the dislike and criticism are nowhere brought together into a coherent whole or supported by any sustained ...”

“... in a way which is pertinent to irony as preternatural vigilance, when he lets enter his engaging self. ‘The awkward dodging to left and to right when two people meet in the street’ was unmasked (unpersuasively, it seems) by Freud as erotic of purpose. ‘The last time I engaged in the act, the other person was a large policeman.’ So? But no. End of ...”

“... with Ben Jonson, the source of the title, whom Lake eventually gets to, rather like the dragon in Robert Graves’s poem. Jonson had the most turbulent, up and down existence of any of Britain’s greatest writers. It’s just possible that he was the son, born posthumously, of a radically alienated Puritan preacher, ...”

“... millenarian preachers among them) that 1857 marked the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, when Robert Clive asserted East India Company ascendancy in Bengal. In the event, it was gun cartridges that set the mutiny off: they were greased, the sepoys believed, with a blend of cow and pig fat, which would defile both Hindus and Muslims when they bit the ends ...”