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“... effusions, light-fingered Italian sonnets (delightfully translated for the Oxford edition by Andrew McNeillie), Ovidian neo-Latin elegies, two of the best answer poems in English (‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’), a masque and two of the best neo-Latin elegies ever written in England and probably even in Northern Europe. These pieces were ...”

“... them for it in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: And O! to think that there are members o’ St Andrew’s Societies sleepin’ soon, Wha tae the papers wrote afore they bedded On regimental buttons or buckled shoon, Or use o’ England where the UK’s meent. The Conservatives want to go on believing that political union is essential at once to the ...”

“... indeed. (Oddly, some critics still suppose that she summons Hamlet because of the Mousetrap – Andrew Gurr’s recent book speaks of her being finally stirred to action: but she is simply proceeding with the plan hatched by Claudius and Polonius before the Mousetrap.) Even the loyal Horatio equivocates when Hamlet tackles him: ‘half a share’ shuffles ...”

“... the diaspora has cultivated a harmless minority identity through Burns Clubs and mutual-help St Andrew Societies. Only in the last 30 years has there been an upsurge of enthusiasm for ‘Scottish heritage’, a spreading craze in North America and Europe which is all about kilts, Highland Games and gruesome invented ceremonies like ‘The Kirkin’ o’ the ...”

“... the historian Walter Russell Mead and others have called ‘Jacksonian’ values, after President Andrew Jackson’s populist nationalism of the 1830s. As Mead has indicated, 11 September has immensely increased the value of this line to Republicans. If on top of this the Republicans can permanently woo the Jewish vote away from the Democrats – a process ...”

“... world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles,’ John Buchan’s old Borders radical Andrew Amos says in Mr Standfast (1919), but most people remained unaffected by the epidemic.By 1913, according to T.C. Smout in A Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950, Glasgow made ‘one fifth of the steel, one third of the shipping tonnage, one half of the ...”

“... Democrats. In Haywire, his steely account of Britain’s backfiring start to the new millennium, Andrew Hindmoor suggests that Cameron’s announcement was intended as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and ...”

“... More rejoiced in the cruelties since they gave the poor souls a foretaste of eternal fire. However noble his conduct in the face of death it’s difficult to feel much sympathy with him. Henry VIII is a devil but that doesn’t make More a saint.In the afternoon to Kendal and the Abbot Hall Gallery, notable for its collection of Romneys (Romney born in ...”

“... thus cunningly made up, ‘makes life, makes interest, makes understanding’, in Henry James’s noble words, and, as he went on, ‘I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of the process.’ Art, in this sense, also makes truth. The truth of art is a question of harmony, and of the deeper kinds of wish-fulfilment which arise out of the ...”

“... On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Martin Gayford reports that Freud told him that when Andrew Parker-Bowles protested about the way his stomach protruded, Freud ‘thought I’d better emphasise it more’. Freud​ met Caroline Blackwood at a party in 1949 when she was 18. Three years later, he painted her portrait. Just as John Minton had ...”

“... in the over-hasty publication of the Selected Letters and, more, by the misunderstandings of Andrew Motion’s Life. The Letters left unexplained the poet’s own characteristic masochistic self-contempt and self-derision, the assumption of attitudes tried out on suitable correspondents but not always held truly or permanently by the writer; the equally ...”

“... words, we are not nearly as far out of the EU as we like to boast (or lament).The idea of the ‘noble lie’ has an ancient parentage. Karl Popper points out in The Open Society that it won’t do to pretend that Plato was merely talking about ‘a bold invention’ – to quote Francis Cornford’s formulation – or a ‘necessary myth’, as it is also ...”

“... The boys worked together on a student newspaper and in student politics. His younger brother, Andrew, took time out from his own media career to work as an adviser to Gordon when he first became an MP. These were the relationships he cherished: permanent bonds with people who will look out for you regardless. The ones he mistrusted were those based on ...”

“... complete general, strict in his discipline, wary in conduct, fearless in action … of a modest, noble, generous disposition’. The narrator also frequently praises Defoe’s hero, Gustavus Adolphus, who is meant by association to remind the reader of his supreme hero, William of Orange. As Novak points out, Defoe noted several times that Gustavus Adolphus ...”

“... planners of tower blocks as deluded, but the utopian dreams of those house builders look pretty noble to me, perhaps because I grew up around them and never saw them as being so otherworldly. We are too quick to denounce them when the housing alternatives in big cities are so miserable.In 1979, a third of people in the UK lived in council housing, but after ...”