“... authorising and justifying the operation, extending as far as the late Lord Widgery and the frail Edward Heath, British PM at the time, who has agreed to give evidence when the Inquiry transfers (and re-creates its technology) in Central Hall, Westminster, later this year, to hear what amounts to the Army’s case for the defence.Are the usual penalties for ...”

“... parent, but when my father died, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer more or less adopted me,’ Judy Garland once said. To get a tiny idea of the strangeness of her position, watch the recording made in 1937 of the 14-year-old Garland with a sweet, rounded face and kiss curls singing ‘You Made Me Love You’ as a fan letter to Clark Gable, with a scrapbook of his pictures ...”

“... closed his account. Hence the ‘age of Elizabeth’ appears to begin from 1547 with the reign of Edward VI. Such concessions to historical ‘tidiness’ (or are they concessions to the continuing draw of Elizabeth’s name?) are small matters. The author does not allow himself to be too closely confined by artificial boundary posts. The debate about the ...”

“... frequently during his professorial year in America in 1932-33 was not Browning, or even Dante, but Edward Lear. Lear’s genius for names – from the Quangle Wangle to the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò – had captivated Eliot from childhood, and he had imitated Lear in his pencil-written magazine of 1899, the Fireside. The ten-year-old Eliot had made up distinctive ...”

“... towards dull conformity would make her a worthy heroine in a Stendhal novel, which cannot be said for many English heroines’. Perhaps it cannot at the moment, but no doubt it will be soon: to see the novel in this way is to see all its heroes and heroines as largely interchangeable in terms of their critical potential and the author’s hidden ...”

“... as fantastic and artificial in its way as Ranelagh. ‘Certain gardens,’ Ian Hamilton Finlay has said, ‘are described as retreats when they are really attacks,’ and Miss Jekyll’s were attacks on the old Morrisian demons of ugliness and standardisation, but also on a world where country estates were getting smaller. Her integration of the garden with ...”

“... of ministers and officials alike that they should be accountable, in public, for what they have said and done. This malaise is not, of course, unique to our own time. It derives some of its potency from more long-term, in some cases enduring, problems. One is the growth of diplomacy within international organisations, much of it concerned with economic and ...”

“... against the grain of his own transcendentalism. ‘I am a passionately religious man,’ he told Edward Garnett in April 1914, as he was completing ‘The Wedding Ring’, an early version of The Rainbow and Women in Love, ‘and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.’ But it remains at least possible that his religious ...”

“... lives and defined personalities in his. At the very outset he demonstrates this skill. There is Edward Parry, son of a cultivated and fashionable doctor in Bath – well-educated, intelligent, pious – a team-player very quick to use his charm and his connections to his own advantage, but also courageous and steadfast. There is John Ross, Parry’s ...”

“... despair, and die!’ The ghosts are those of the people we know as the Duke of Clarence, Prince Edward, Queen Anne and others. The movie is Richard III, although the man in the novel doesn’t know this, since he has caught only part of the film on television, and the time is the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The toy planes and the movie run through ...”

“... humble birth, could have such courtesy. Grosseteste acknowledged that his parents were humble, but said that he had lived his life among really great men – the men in the Bible. Both parties sound a bit rude, but perhaps in both cases unintentionally, Richard merely having the usual manners of the English aristocracy and Grosseteste believing that the ...”

“... anything to do with the Nazis was as damaging to the nation’s soul as anything alleged against Edward VIII. Wodehouse had been an emblem of Britishness for the smug, Daily Telegraph elements in the United Kingdom: his work was ‘the sort of thing foreigners don’t understand’ – like cricket, Gilbert and Sullivan. Malcolm Muggeridge has told an ...”

“... barbed wire they are what the world was like Before the War. We take the cards and steam off any Edward VII or George V stamps to use as (pretty mediocre) swaps. Among the picture postcards are photographs on stiffer card: Grandma on outings with the ladies’ bowling club, striding along some promenade in a long, laughing line, big ladies in cloche hats and ...”

“... This reflects their own pleasure in the chase: in exploring, for example, the tower raised by Edward Bull (who later built Borley rectory) – ‘the most frightening building we have ever been half-way up’ – or in penetrating the dank underground works at Witley Park, which culminate in a small underwater ballroom with a glazed dome – a people tank ...”

“... can turn out much like another’s. At least Polanski (as transcribed, if that is the word, by Edward Behr) is witty enough to make several of his own productions memorable. At first, he provoked disaster: while still at Lodz, he enlivened his own apprentice film of the end-of-session school dance by inviting a gang of tearaways to smash the occasion ...”