“... of trench warfare did not shock Rosenberg into poetry or make him see more clearly. The war may have accelerated his poetic development as much as it cramped its production, but it did not fundamentally change its course. Like that of his longer lived contemporary David Jones (born five years after Rosenberg, in ...”

“... is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories ...”

“... critic says he does, and indeed that’s part of the transaction. While the critic’s response may not be fully our own, it is an ideal proxy, a model for what our response might be. Of course Winckelmann’s tone, his language of sensibility, is not what we ask from art critics now (though it is sometimes what we get). But that voice of witness still ...”

“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication ...”

“... The most enthusiastic moment came when David Cameron promised to end poverty and pronounced the Tories the real party of the poor. The Conservatives have, of course, always thought themselves the real party of the poor but this time the claim was accompanied by some genuine rhetoric about inequality which they may come to regret ...”

“... shabby universe reeking of the small screen and a low budget. But then what else would we want? It may be that this all seems so authentic only in the light of the gloss and spaciousness of the new film; but even so, the seediness works, as does the leisurely pace of the series, and I found myself wondering whether television as a medium, a set of small square ...”

“... In July last year, two months after assuming his duties as minister for universities and science, David Willetts granted university status to BPP University College of Professional Studies, making it only the second private institution in England, after the University of Buckingham, to be given the power to award degrees ...”

“... enjoyment’) or insulting Joshua Reynolds (‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’). A few may have been excited by the promise addressed to Christians at the top of one of the Jerusalem plates: I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at Heavens gate, Built in Jerusalems wall. The great Northrop Frye, in ...”

“... discovery was made by natives, to which fact the unfortunately mutilated condition of the papyrus may be ascribed. Most of the fractures are recent.’ The Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge, writing in 1920, remembered that he bought the papyrus ‘at a preposterous price’ from an Egyptian dealer, who said it had been found in a ransacked tomb between the feet ...”

“... the mendacity or hypocrisy of a public man who says one thing and privately does another. In 2007, David Runciman devoted his Carlyle Lectures at Oxford to the subject of hypocrisy – not hypocrisy in general, but hypocrisy in politics. It is a wonderful topic. Everyone knows that politics is partly a matter of ritual and ceremony, deception and ...”

“... the House of Lords enough of a theatrical show? What special purpose does the council serve? David Rogers’s book, only the second published on the subject in the last hundred years (the first was Sir Almeric FitzRoy’s The History of the Privy Council), seeks to understand the institution by looking at its history. Ancient though they are, the ...”

“... Theodora and attendants, from a sixth-century mosaic in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna David Potter’s contribution to the series is a life of the sixth-century Byzantine empress Theodora, the wife of Justinian, who ruled the eastern Roman provinces from Constantinople for almost forty years. Justinian had been a soldier from Illyrian peasant ...”

“... We know these to be facts because newspapers and electronic media have exposed them fearlessly. David Cameron, when he was prime minister, was so concerned about the situation that he appointed the veteran Tory politician and entrepreneur Lord Young to report on the state of health and safety legislation and ‘the rise of the compensation culture over the ...”

“... it inspired a rich store of legends about his astonishing feats of magic. As the medievalist David Collins asked, is it Magnus or Magus, Albert the Great or Albert the Magician? Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell, who have long toiled on the Albertian corpus, provide a lively, accessible introduction to his life and thought. Albert joined the Dominican ...”