“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was afraid. He was not a man to ...”

“... and Young’s sociology), in the messy, chaotic work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Art Brut (‘Fuck Henry Moore’ was one slogan), in vernacular architecture, in industrial buildings, and in Hollywood films and advertising. Their buildings were meant to be noisy; for Banham, exemplars include Lasdun’s ‘Cluster Block’ at Keeling House in Bethnal ...”

“... on the abuses that made the Middle Passage particularly grim.Adopting the syntax of Milton and James Thomson, language associated at this date with ideas of liberty, he entangles the reader with the ‘groans, and loud laments’ heard on slave ships and reports that                                            female shrieks,At ...”

“... deathbed scribblings of Robert Greene, but is nowadays attributed to its ostensible ‘editor’, Henry Chettle. It scoffingly refers to him as ‘Shake-scene’ and calls him an ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’, in other words a plagiarist. This episode is the subject of a very interesting essay by Andy Kesson. Sociologically speaking, his ...”

“... claimed to have seen him behind the counter. Then he’d joined the Rep before becoming a star. James Mason was another local boy who had made good, though from what beginnings I wasn’t sure: maybe he’d worked in a gents’ outfitters too.‘Making good’ meant getting out, as you would have to do if you were going to be a film star, but which applied ...”

“... its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed the toddler James Bulger and were now about to be released. Nothing in her decision turned on a confidential relationship – there was none – between the youths and the press: what mattered was the nature of the information and the risk it posed to their privacy and ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody ...”

“... or not this bit of gossip is true, that ending would have fitted the epic sweep of the movie. But James Harvey found the happy ending a relief: ‘Sensible people don’t kill or maim each other for revenge or honour or empty matters of pride.’† And for Pippin the happy ending fits because the film was not really an epic to begin with: Dunson’s cattle ...”

“... of an international world order’. In the process the Congolese have paid a high price. When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in 1876 the huge landmass, mostly covered in forest and coinciding with the drainage basin of the river, had been ravaged by the slave trade and the hunt for ivory; tribal chieftains had lost out to Portuguese merchants and ...”

“... them. These claims were kept up by Rockingham and Burke as long as the former lived, by Charles James Fox and Burke thereafter, and by Fox after his breach with Burke over the French Revolution. They always carried intimations of improper royal behaviour, and came to amount to the claim that the King should accept his ministers from Parliament and should ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... Kauffman were friends, while the younger Cosway began her career, as her critical friend James Northcote wrote, ‘filled with the highest expectations of being … another Angelica Kauffman’. Le Brun and Cosway coincided several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had ...”