“... Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer of the faintest mafia, now runs a comfortable little establishment of its own. Consider how ...”

“... that chapter 29 of Magna Carta rose to near scriptural status: ‘No freeman [for which now read person] shall be … exiled, or any other wise destroyed … but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’ Baker points out the potential relevance of this still-extant provision to the Chagos islanders’ litigation, in which it formed ...”

“... And looking beyond the limits of this collection, what about Count Metternich (not to speak of Peter Mandelson, who is invoked, perhaps not altogether seriously, in the publisher’s press release)? ‘The World of the Favourite’ appears to be a piece of string which can be stretched so far that it turns into fairly useless elastic. It was also a ...”

“... age group and because younger women have denser breast tissue, which makes mammograms harder to read.) In a mammogram the contrast is between fat, which is more or less transparent to X-rays, and other tissues, which appear either as overlapping fibrous strands or as a dense cloud. These form a complex background against which the signs of cancer must be ...”

“... cultural delegates in 1954 had been involved in these events as young men, and most of them had read Edgar Snow’s hugely influential – and partisan – Red Star over China, published by the Left Book Club in 1937. Wright suggests that Snow’s book and the journalism of Agnes Smedley accounted for just about everything these travellers knew about modern ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week ...”

“... advocate of this view; and ‘countless paintings, particularly genre scenes, had to be “read” in a manner comparable to studying riddles and rebuses.’ The untutored eye might see only a group of men and women eating, drinking and music-making; but the educated viewer would recognise in a Merry Company an allegory of the five senses and ...”

“... accept if we had any evidence that the poem had any readers. Even Mortlock would seem not to have read it, for it is hard to believe that he would knowingly have run the risk of losing Stillingfleet’s business. Supposing that the decision to publish Order and Disorder was Lucy Hutchinson’s, we have then to ask what it was that she meant to publish. Order ...”

“... often willing to experiment with highly volatile social materials.’ So the bishops became, in Peter Brown’s striking phrase, impresarios of the sacred. They took the bodies of the saints from their shrines outside the cities, and placed them under the altars of their cathedrals. Rather than a trigger for conflicting pieties, the saint became a centre of ...”

“... an influence on him in his less realist modes); the encounters with bears and goblins in Lapland read like something out of a Scandinavian folk tale. Munthe built his house and his memoir in similar ways, accumulating material from disparate sources – he brought a red granite sphinx from Egypt to glare out over the Bay of Naples, and dredged up from the ...”

“... that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had, but when Auden gave his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry the following year I dutifully went along, knowing, though not quite why, that he was some sort of celebrity. At that time I still ...”

“... These​ two books will be read, inevitably, as studies of neoliberalism, a world order – and a word – that has snuck up on us in the last few decades. I say ‘snuck up’ for a reason. I remember the 1980s, when our antagonists were identifiable and embodied: the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors ...”

“... and found on the phone of Barbara Allison, then Scottish Government director of communications, read: ‘We have lost the battle but we will win the war.’ Two messages from the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (who is married to Sturgeon), sent the day after Salmond was first charged, were leaked to the Westminster MP ...”

“... touching picture ... of an England now lost’. The story will be a familiar one to those who have read his published diaries. In 1936, Lees-Milne joined the National Trust as one of its staff of four. Since its inception in 1895, the Trust had interpreted its mission as it is currently once again beginning to do, concentrating on purchasing particular ...”