“... The Prince was walking up and down in silence. He caught me by the hands and said: ‘Oh! say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear, dear Mrs Asquith, can we not stop it?’ (wringing his hands) … ‘I do not understand what has happened. What is it all about?’ Millions​ of people then and ever since have shared the bafflement and anguish of Prince Lichnowsky and have asked the same questions ...”

“... confesses to being in love with his sheep, Daisy: ‘It was the greatest lay I ever had!’ In Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), the same premise plays out as family tragedy. The disclosure of the father’s goat-love – ‘a love of an … (dogmatic) un-i-mag-in-able kind’ – prompts both marital crisis and a frantic burst of ...”

“... of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his first speech in his new position, Wheeler said: ‘I get frustrated with the media when they report I was a coal lobbyist.’)*It is revealed that President Trump told a visiting group of Spanish ministers that Spain should build a wall across the entire Sahara desert to keep out refugees.*Testifying ...”

“... However peculiar we may find this remark, the method would certainly be justified if it indeed said anything very new or interesting about the novels or the novelist. But it doesn’t, and at first it isn’t easy to see what it provides instead, especially since it avoids gossip, or claims to. What then does it offer? The answer is that it offers lots of ...”

“... and detail. It is without any doubt a central historical document of the period it covers. That said, the apparently exhaustive accounts of issues and events are often crucially distorted by omissions and silences. Her rendition of the Westland affair makes almost no mention of the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter and the bogus ‘inquiry’ into ...”

“... mathematics, starved himself to death, believing his doctors were poisoning him. Dirac, who said, ‘I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all,’ but correctly predicted the existence of anti-matter, was famous ...”

“... recited in British and American universities about what these three philosophers wanted, what they said, and where they went wrong. For the book offers an Anglo-Saxon audience features not previously found within a single volume. It is an insider’s book, in the sense that the young Habermas cut his philosophical teeth on Heidegger – just as the young ...”

“... further in a sepulchral world of its own. Even then, the couple’s only way was probably out: an Edward VIII-plus solution, with its terminal implications for the future of the institution. After September, can there be any doubt at all? There are still trusties like Vernon Bogdanor and Clive James who feel that ‘we’ cannot live without the ...”

“... to his penis as a ‘club’. ‘His club!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Bunny’s club,’ said the other. This exchange, according to Mitchell, was ‘not unkind’; the women were amused because ‘they knew how unreliable a club could be.’ Adulterous affairs were commonplace well into the middle age of Sayre’s parents’ generation and ‘were ...”

“... River (1941), described by his secretary as ‘so unlike him, so introspective’, the dying Sir Edward Leithen spends his last days saving indigenous Canadians in the name of ‘the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown’. The Island of Sheep (1936) proposes a similar brotherhood between the angry African tribesmen who save the day in the ...”

“... the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would ...”

“... end of time, remain profoundly proud of the glorious achievements of the old British Empire.’ So said the Conservative politician Duncan Sandys in 1962. He added that he was equally proud of having converted the empire ‘peacefully and amicably into the new independent Commonwealth – a development without parallel in history’. At the time, many people ...”

“... a recitative setting of the speech from Cesare Morelli, an expatriate Italian composer. Edward Bysshe later anthologised it in his Art of English Poetry (1702), Anthony Ashley-Cooper praised it in his Characteristicks (1710), John Hughes discussed it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert ...”

“... overcrowded with mahogany furniture’ described in South Riding (‘solid comfort’, Mrs Beddows said). It was a world in which, as Muriel discovers in Holtby’s second novel, The Crowded Street, the only possible life for a woman was marriage, and if you wanted something different, you had to get out. In October 1919, she went back to Somerville to finish ...”

“... happy. I sit and listen to my own blood, or to someone’s blood. ‘I am no more your mother,’ said Sylvia Plath. ‘I am no more your mother than …’ As for Henrietta – I am pregnant. I cannot conclude. I am lodged at AltaVista 44, a site called ‘What Happens’: it’s the story, among other things, of her revenge. Everything on the Internet is ...”