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“... to the workers and to retain a faded empire. They were both welfarist and imperialist beyond the means of the economy they controlled, which they were incapable of modernising because they were ignorant of science, technology and industry. Barnett notes that, except for trade unionists, only one member of the Labour Cabinet of 1945 had had any experience of ...”

“... a full-time calling, the periodical press of the day, particularly local newspapers, offered a means for them to put their best efforts into print. In this way, a New York judge named Henry Livingston published his children’s verses beginning ‘’Twas the Night before Christmas’ in a local paper in the 1820s, only to have a more established poet ...”

“... oligarchy as much as it suits a rapacious one. As Mount points out, this sense of powerlessness means we live in a world very different from the one envisaged by some of the prophets of the new oligarchy. James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution (1941), envisaged a post-democratic order in which power was concentrated in the hands of an elite ...”

“... of the novel through digital storytelling (slim, thus far, would seem to be the upshot). By no means all the relevant reasons and contexts are Western. Andrew Plaks, for example, argues for the existence in China, from the early 16th to the late 19th century, of ‘works of extended prose fiction that, if not perfectly consonant with all of the aesthetic ...”

“... Catherine appeared before a local magistrate and formally accused Father Girard of using unholy means to seduce her. According to her deposition he had breathed into her mouth, after which she had developed unnatural passions. A lawyer with Jansenist sympathies then became involved in the case and published dozens of briefs, some of them hundreds of pages ...”

“... the characters’ rich, funny thought-lives, but they can’t access one another’s. Their chief means of understanding other people, and the world, is not speech but sight. The opening section, ‘The Party’, is told from the point of view of an unnamed elderly widow living alone with her cat in a terraced house, her solitude broken only by visits ‘once ...”

“... well known than the Grand National but more prestigious. (The Grand National is a handicap, which means the best horse doesn’t often win: the better you are the more weight you have to carry, making it more of a lottery; the Gold Cup is run on merit.) The regular punters at the Tufnell Park branch of Coral weren’t exactly professional gamblers but they ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... about Enright’s life and work by a variety of writers. This festschrift’s title, Life by Other Means, derives from an Enright poem called ‘Poetical Justice’ which muses rather more ambiguously on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation. Dr Johnson, one of Enright’s touchstones, records how he was so ...”

“... The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by that means to find out as much as possible about the extent and organisation of male homosexual activity in Newport. The decoys soon discovered that the Army and Navy YMCA was the most popular hangout for ‘fairies’, by which they referred to men who violated ...”

“... on the European Journal of International Law’s blog, the legalistic treatment of atrocities means that ‘states are given the benefit of the doubt in relation to ongoing abuses’ and ‘this enables other states (and other powerful entities) to appeal to plausible legality in erring on the side of facilitating atrocity in real time’. Our new foreign ...”

“... activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied ...”

“... of balancing the skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be ...”

“... from territories occupied’ in 1967. The third principle affirmed diplomacy as the only viable means of resolving the conflict and protecting both Israeli and Arab state interests – even at the expense of popular wishes and rights.The 1973 war confirmed that the state of Israel was here to stay and wasn’t going to be defeated militarily. Two months ...”

“... He has been, in his own words, ‘a consistent anti-totalitarian’, though he admits that this means ‘one might have to expose oneself to steadily mounting contradictions.’ He has had to adjust himself, intellectually and geographically, to his growing taste for the United States and his sense of its power to do good in the world. He moved to the US ...”