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“... important posts but withdrew from consideration – the names would include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Rashid Khalidi and the anti-war Republican senator Chuck Hagel, whose leaked note to George W. Bush may have saved the US from a war with Iran in 2007. If one made it a list of incidents as well as persons, one would have to count the snub to Jimmy ...”

“... colophon to the 16th-century Maitland Folio manuscript copy of Dunbar’s ‘To speik of science, craft, or sapience’, a poem which criticises learning detached from its moral application, states: ‘Quod Dumbar at Oxinfurde’. Did Dunbar go to Oxford during the 1501 trip? It is unlikely. The stream of Scots studying at Oxford seems pretty well to have ...”

“... while levying heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be identified as irresponsible high ...”

“... keep it there: it served only as a depot, all the work, admittedly tricky, being done in smaller craft nominally under his orders. He did not seem to care about this, and there was reason to doubt whether his professional skill was anything like equal to his mad self-confidence. On one occasion a boom defence vessel was for some reason detached and sent to ...”

“... creating unity; only its content was different. Two of Durkheim’s followers, the anthropologists Robert Hertz and Arnold Van Gennep, provide Ben-Amos with the narrative for the ‘Culture’ section. Hertz argued that the death of an individual was the death of a social being and thus a blow to the social order. The community healed this wound by means of ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”

“... to nearer that of the real one, and cutting ‘futility’ from his title. ‘She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men,’ his book begins. Hubris was waiting in the wings: ‘The steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.’ She was commanded by officers who ‘were not only seamen but scientists’; ‘she was a ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a proud Amazon, armoured and helmeted, repulsing European foes and civilising barbarians is, these days, according to ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... life was a curious mind and an imagination always playing with possibility, but above all his craft and his career, the sense of film as an art and a discipline, a kind of experiment in which even the wildest jokes took on a certain aspect of rigour or purity.I met Buñuel in July 1978, through an old friend, Santiago Genovés, a Mexican ...”

“... could have changed his sensibility, but, despite contact and correspondence with the likes of Robert Lowell, he remained a visitor, too busy to look beyond the clichés. Writing to David Hammond from Salt Lake City airport in 1987, he notes the snowcapped Rockies and the big open sky of the West but says that this ‘domain of magnificent romance’ has ...”

“... gather from his letters to them – or to close English friends like Charles Milnes Gaskell, Sir Robert Cuncliffe and Cecil Spring Rice – that the gamut of writers he casually and aptly quoted or alluded to seriously engaged him. Not one letter contains an extended passage on a literary work. His test for a storyteller, a ‘trivial sort of animal’, was ...”

“... strayed in from Excellent Women in order to make this observation. In developing her novelist’s craft in the 1950s, and in working for Africa, Barbara Pyrm was exposed to prevailing ideas of what social anthropology was about. Of these, perhaps the dominant fashion, and certainly the one that seems most clearly reflected in her novels, is functionalism. In ...”

“... to promote himself as a ‘character’. He was disciplined in his work, minutely devoted to his craft. What he wrote of himself in Paris applies equally well to the early life of his son Constant: ‘I joined the religious few whose ritual stated very clearly that it was not the one achievement, not the one egg, the one talent that mattered two whoops in ...”