“... Nationalist or Loyalist) according to which London and Dublin are conceived as ‘foreign powers’ is doubtless diplomatically correct. But I would guess that the recent Anglo-Irish agreement was so eagerly welcomed in Britain because it seemed to suggest that, politically, the two countries could return to what in cultural terms they had never lost ...”

“... of the woods and maul the children, killing them. The prophet is Elisha, who inherited Elijah’s powers when the latter ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. Kings 2.23-24 is the West’s first account of ‘mocking children’ – the language is the Bible’s – and also marks the beginning of what psychologists in the 1980s called ‘the blame ...”

“... sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The ...”

“... has long since drained away. Most councils’ budgets are eaten up by social care provision, their powers reduced to decisions over private-sector procurement. Competence, diligence and resistance to corruption still matter – opportunities for graft are plentiful – though thuggish self-advancement is hardly rare. Despite a few halting steps towards ...”

“... Prometheus are the son and father of one of the miners who is about to be made redundant. The boy (Jonathan Waistnidge) has been given a speech by ‘Goldenballs’ as Hermes derisively calls him, to learn for his homework: With Prometheus life began to flourish for benighted Man. My gift of fire made Mankind free but I stay in captivity. By mistake the boy ...”

“... scepticism and hostility, whether from other intellectuals or professionals or from the powers that be in the academy or the state. If people express doubts about the continuing credibility or desirability of your subject, it’s no bad thing to be able to point to some towering intellect whose stature nobody dares to impugn, and who if not actually ...”

“... we’re just bluffing.’ What happened in October 2002 is that both Governments, according to Jonathan Pollack, a knowledgable specialist writing in the Naval War College Review, ‘opted to exploit the intelligence for political purposes’, and so to unravel ‘close to a decade of painfully crafted diplomatic arrangements designed to prevent full-scale ...”

“... to squeeze whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last decades, it has swelled ...”

“... up a report in 1980 instructing the RUC to place spying ahead of solving crimes. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which hears cases brought against the security and intelligence agencies, confirmed in 2019 that MI5 had drawn up guidelines that would allow their officers to make representations to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, arguing that ...”

“... celebration of art’s ‘other means’, the poem ends up offering a complex enquiry into art’s powers of equivocation. It’s almost impossible to gauge the poem’s tone with any certainty. How ironic is this wistful harking back to the firm Johnsonian ideals of justice which ‘all reasonable beings’ would accept? Are we meant to condemn or to concur ...”

“... because Ethiopia’s League membership gave her a claim to sovereign equality with the European powers that the Italian aggression of 1935 created such a stir. The first major use which Tafari made of his new status was to lodge a complaint against Britain and Italy in 1926 for agreeing to back each other’s demands for economic concessions in their ...”

“... however, they were paramount. Here they eclipsed outlaw heroes of folk tradition – Dick Turpin, Jonathan Wild, Dick Sheppard – and usurped the leadership of the police in the fight against delinquency and disorder. The prolific Stephen Knight has calculated that Sherlock Holmes had at least 13 predecessors, some of them women. Most were quickly ...”

“... were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find ...”

“... Delane, the first great editor of the Times, said in 1852: ‘The purpose and duties of the two powers are constantly separate, generally independent, sometimes diametrically opposed … the press can enter into no close or binding alliances with the statesmen of the day, nor can it surrender its permanent interests to the convenience of the ephemeral power ...”

“... abuse which were the lot of the embattled satirist. Johnson had heard the son of Pope’s friend Jonathan Richardson give an account of the poet greeting an attack by Colley Cibber, who was to be crowned King of the Dunces in the final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of ...”