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“... the British Consulate were waiting on the quay. The passengers (Helen, sheet-white) were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more forms to fill in. My uncle Peter thinks they were then put up for a couple of weeks in the Pera Palace Hotel, established in 1895 by the Wagons-Lits Company as the unofficial ...”

“... by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly grossness of Merrymakers at Shrovetide plunges us straight into the world of the plays themselves. The analogy is suggested by Taylor in an introductory essay on Middleton’s ‘Lives and Afterlives’, in which he compares the crowded canvases of Hals’s genre paintings with the ‘seemingly spontaneous ...”

“... to can seem tiring and faintly objectionable. But it does have the merit that it sets the record straight in an area where gossip about the composer was inevitably rife. We now know all we need to know about the pats on the head, the paternal hugs and goodnight kisses bestowed by Britten on the boys who processed guilelessly (and, in some cases, not so ...”

“... the biographer looking over her shoulder. Almost as often, one finds oneself reading passages of straight reporting as if they were playing the tricks of a novel, using flatness to imply feeling, disguising as unruffled objectivity the chilled revulsion of a wife. For this is not, it must have leaked out by now, the traditional saint’s life expected of ...”

“... portrait of Achille-Cléophas; while the pinched virtue of his grandmother, who ‘thought straight and thought wrongly’ reminds us inevitably of Mme Flaubert. Sartre liked to argue that there was one great and significant difference between himself and Flaubert: he was loved and pampered as a child, whereas Flaubert was mal aimé. Even if we accept ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”

“... same side as their leader. Rather than acting as a vehicle for Bevan’s views, Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, described itself as leading the campaign against the H-bomb. Lee believed that the Bevanites’ desertion was responsible for the cancer that killed Bevan in 1960: ‘until their attacks began, he never had so much as a stomach ache,’ she wrote ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, was being taken over by competitive repudiations of Michael O’Halloran, the much put-down Member for North Islington who had come over to the Social Democrats in the company of a considerable contingent of councillors. The timing of the Islington cross-over enabled Liberal speakers to put a name to what gave ...”

“... Englander’ in Taylor coming out, a superannuated cast of mind he shares with his close friend Michael Foot. It is English history that one writes, the Scots, Irish and Welsh constituting ‘the lesser breeds [who] were allowed in when they made a difference in English affairs, as they often did.’ It is also a lingering sense that Britain is still a ...”

“... impulses? Or does Kant have some sturdy intuitions on his side too? If semantics really is (as Michael Dummett has claimed) ‘first philosophy’, should we try desperately to make the right decision between Russell and Kripke, so as to know whether it will be necessary to reconstruct the rest of philosophy and culture? Modern thought on everything from ...”

“... ground; ancient architects induced a subtle curvature into a line of columns so that it would look straight. Kant’s philosophy of perception would not require symbolic emendation were we to live under the starry heavens without language or culture, matters to which he paid no great heed. What Panofsky supposed is that people under different symbolic systems ...”

“... of the most-famous-butterfly-hunter-in-the-world ready to swipe, the gaze for once directed straight at us, the chubby knees beaming ingenuously; and we know the quarry is no palpitating ‘lep’, as he called them, but palpitating us. This bit of calculated charm appears in most books about Nabokov, but decently tucked away. Here it provides the ...”

“... carpenters, labourers and odd-job men. In taste and style, the garden is unashamedly aristocratic. Straight lines are to be avoided because they are ‘extremely vulgar’, and there is no room for ‘the more vulgar sort of flower’. The overall effect is to be ...”