“... an 1827 cartoon by Michael Egerton (her selection of London fog illustrators, from Cruikshank to David Langdon, adds entertainment and insight all through the book.)Corton salutes Dickens’s mastery of ‘the use of fog as extended metaphor’. And of course no fog in literature approaches that introduction to Bleak House with ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the ...”

“... of a scullery maid accustomed to hardship. And yet he sensed, beneath that image, glints of pride held firmly in check. She was anaemic. Her flat chest was not formed to rouse desire. Nevertheless she was strangely appealing, perhaps because she seemed troubled, despondent, sickly. ‘What did you do before you came to work here?’ ‘I’m an ...”

“... who was lord chancellor at the time, sought to reduce the length of sentences for serious crimes; David Cameron publicly overruled him. So, despite representing less than half the legal aid budget, civil claims – which are usually claims individuals make to remedy breaches of their rights – bore the brunt of the cuts. The strategy was to remove various ...”

“... were getting more serious. In 1974 another Clermont habitué and founder of the SAS, Colonel David Stirling, formed GB75, a vigilante group to be mobilised in the event of civil unrest.Veronica Lucan was not only unhappy, she was mentally fragile and her relationship with her sister and brother-in-law volatile. After a spectacularly unhappy Christmas in ...”

“... at the University of Manchester, but has since roved through several scientific fields. He briefly held an academic post at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, and has had other spells in large institutions, but for most of his career he has worked as an independent scientist and consultant. Early on he designed several instruments for analysing ...”

“... bourgeois, his sympathies anti-fascist. As a young man in December 1944 he was arrested and held in harsh prison conditions by the occupying Nazis until their expulsion from the city the following April. He studied medicine in Padua, where he specialised in mental and nervous diseases but read widely in existentialism and ...”

“... clarified me to myself,’ Ammons told him in 1970). Yet when Ammons assented to David Lehman’s interpretation in an interview for the Paris Review (‘I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you had been’), one senses mischief. ‘Harold wants me to be intense, mad, consistently ...”

“... for this magnum opus, presented his paintings as delays in wax, screens where motifs could be held fast so as to test our responses (or lack of them). His voice is mostly passive, his verbs largely intransitive; Arrive/Depart is a typical title.In a studied phrase Johns spoke of his position as one of ‘shunning statement’. This suggests an aversion to ...”

“... removal of ruins and the burning of ancient marbles for lime. Other popes followed his example. As David Karmon showed some time ago, the movement to conserve ancient sites in their current state was born in the same years when antiquarians worried that Rome was consuming its own substance to fuel its revival.Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson tells the story ...”

“... he worked at IISS and Chatham House. The major influence on his work was Michael Howard, who held the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford, translated Clausewitz, and founded both the Department of War Studies and the IISS. Howard supervised Freedman’s PhD thesis and remained his mentor until his death in 2019. Howard was an elegant example of the ...”

“... The connoisseur of deathbeds, of the fortitude of their occupants, of the composure of the atheist David Hume, the prison visitor who liked to watch executions, and appears to have lacked Johnson’s terror of futurity, was off somewhere on business when his wife stopped living. The journal deals with his five years as the widower formed by that crisis. His ...”

“... order and the idea of Rome, must come forward in his place. This severe placing of the two poets held firmly and perhaps still holds. When I was taught Latin and Greek it was made very clear to me that Ovid was a negligible poet: frivolous, trivial, superficial. I imagine that in the intervening centuries a formal objection had gradually taken ...”

“... already complied with it when they ceded a few thousand square miles of sand to Egypt in the Camp David Accords. Still, the West Bank and Gaza Strip today contain more than a million and a half Palestinians who, under international law and the rules of the United Nations, are clearly entitled to create their own national state, just as Israel was permitted to ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”