“... as little more than an invitation to fraud’. Sanford Levinson, a progressive law professor, said that he had become increasingly dismayed by ‘the costs to intellectual honesty of the felt need to shoehorn one’s arguments into the language of “diversity”’. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a group created by ...”

“... way. Just as he is a mystic literalist, so too he is a natural stylist. He knew this. He wrote to Edward Marsh about his poetry, thus: ‘I have always tried to get an emotion out in its own course, without altering it.’ And yet, he added, ‘it needs the finest instinct imaginable, much finer than the skill of the craftsmen.’ Lawrence’s naturalness as ...”

“... Mulder (although that former minister has since gone into spectacular political eclipse). He said that ‘when the National Party policy is taken to its logical conclusion, there will no longer be a black man in South Africa who has South African citizenship.’ Theconjuring trick is achieved by bringing about the independence of the Homelands, so ...”

“... in the footsteps of Gogol in Dead Souls – a matter Mr Hingley does not discuss. ‘I realise,’ said Chekhov, ‘that Gogol will turn in his grave, being Russian literature’s King of the Steppe. I’ve well-meaningly trespassed on his preserves, but I haven’t half botched things.’ Yegorushka’s journey reaches a high point at the country inn run by ...”

“... the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward Packe-Drury-Lowe – inherently absurd because of the prospect of infinite fission: if triple, why not quadruple or quintuple? One of the boys in my house had the surname Christie. His father owned Glyndebourne. ‘Christie’ meant something to me, so I ...”

“... bon viveur, friend of Proust and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Lewis said that in 1968 he ‘engaged the services’ of Marion Mainwaring, a Radcliffe graduate and freelance writer living in Paris, to pursue the ‘Parisian phase’ of Edith Wharton’s life and in particular ‘the matter of Morton Fullerton’. And Lewis ...”

“... often they did not return. Trimble’s political career began with the prorogation of Stormont by Edward Heath on 24 March 1972 – ‘I am,’ he says, ‘the product of the destruction of Stormont’ – but it was fuelled by grief and anger along the way. Grief especially at the murder by the IRA of his close friend and colleague in the Queen’s ...”

“... in the 1960s was merely the prototype for the full-scale invasion of privacy that, as revealed by Edward Snowden, has since become standard government procedure; Abu Ghraib was merely the tip of the iceberg of ‘enhanced interrogation procedures’ still secretly in use in the endless war on terror. At our current moment, amid pervasive public ignorance ...”

“... woman called Margherita, who happened to be the wife of a minor Medici. Her aggrieved husband said she ‘was taken against her will by the Count of Mirandola’s men, was put on a horse and carried off’. Pico’s sister claimed that Margherita was in love with him all along and would have followed him anywhere, no force necessary. His nephew and ...”

“... seeing old school friends would make him uneasy, in case they ‘remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded’. Scholarships took him to Cambridge, where he might have been expected to prepare for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones ...”

“... 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 ...”