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“... the events seen from dear Carrie’s point of view. However, every truthful diary (even from such sturdy fellows as Edmund Wilson or Sir Peter Hall) shows up the writer in a ludicrous light, all the little manias and depressions exposed. Carrie is as Pooterish as her husband. Much of her time is devoted to plotting against him, devising schemes for moving the ...”

“... impressive in its folio bulk, though not nearly as bulky as the originals of 1611, which needed a sturdy lectern to bear them, announcing their presence with a swagger equal to the most majestic of England’s medieval church buildings. Inside, Oxford University Press have thoughtfully provided a sticky-back presentation label, since most of these monuments ...”

“... the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they have little hope of getting ...”

“... In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was perfect’ – are sitting by the fire in their house in London, one night in spring, when they receive a visit from an elderly stranger ...”

“... to the dog?’ Another kind of person might be wondering about Nunez’s crossbreeding of two sturdy but familiar kinds of story: of working through a life crisis by communing with an animal (see H is for Hawk etc), and of a writer and/or academic who’s undone by confusing the problems of high culture with the problem of sex (see innumerable campus ...”

“... Should​ the voters have known better? The modestly obscure Orange Book of 2004, edited by David Laws, later briefly chief secretary to the Treasury in the 2010 coalition, with contributions from Clegg, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne, did stress free market and non-statist solutions to problems of public policy – in deliberate contrast to the ...”

“... flying squirrel’. Godzilla returned in King Kong v. Godzilla (1962), which introduced the sturdy ‘v.’ format and was enjoyed by some 12.6 million cinemagoers. But the most influential movie of the cycle was Mothra (1961), in which a giant moth turns out to be a wise, benevolent creature attracted by church bells and crosses. Mothra’s strain of ...”

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”

“... long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the Rialto bridge. If Byron’s lameness and sturdy seal-like physique both helped to make him a compulsive swimmer, endlessly competing with the powerful Trelawney, he does not seem to have shared the mystical feeling for water and immersion of other Romantic poets, notably the non-swimmer Shelley. Byron ...”

“... to credit as the notion that Irish people could once hear de Valera speak of ‘the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens’ without sniggering. Ahern, Cowen’s predecessor as taoiseach, who was lucky enough to be turfed out just before the economic storm broke, used his final appearance in the Dáil ...”

“... immediately after the war, conditions in Britain, especially in the cities, were pretty grim. As David Kynaston tells it, people were exhausted, low in spirits, their resources depleted, and over everything there hung the threat of another, probably terminal war. The dawn of the postwar era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the ...”

“... about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an ...”

“... in the playgrounds of new schools, no patients prostrate in municipal hospital wards, no sturdy policemen or firefighters, not even men and women toiling or going about their business. Some planning sneaks in, but very little architecture: such things are vieux jeu. From today’s austere perspective of urban history, culture means a way of life, and ...”

“... of instruments, perhaps a quartet, and with them write passages in a major key – the key of sturdy resistance to meanness and despair and everything that tries to drag us under. An ailing husband or modern King David goes off for a last restorative fling with an accommodating Bathsheba. ‘Don’t come back ...”

“... Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on the relationship between ...”