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“... activist whose left-wing aspirations are expressed by singing a song about hens ganging up on a fox. Esteban wants to kill this left-winger and is guided to his hide-out by his illegitimate grandson: but the old fool only manages to cut the chap’s fingers off. Later, Esteban makes his grandson into a policeman, hoping he will use his authority for the ...”

“... Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what their Labour masters wanted, and did it very well. Nationalisation apart (and few of them ...”

“... this. The opium trade, they believed, demeaned and disgraced the whole enterprise. The Radical Richard Cobden thought it showed the British up as ‘bullies’ and ‘cowards’. The imperialist Lord Elgin claimed it revealed ‘how hollow and superficial’ were ‘both their civilisation and their Christianity’. Gladstone thought it ‘covered this ...”

“... partly mistaken if we suppose that the language of the Prayer Book was popular language. As Adam Fox has recently explained in Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700, early modern England consisted of a huge variety of ‘speech communities’, local and occupational. These languages were not mutually comprehensible, and while they caused real ...”

“... no matter by whom, what has become of it? Fravor, when asked about the origins of the UFO by a Fox News presenter shortly after the footage was released, said that he believed it was ‘not from this world’. The release of the footage may be strange, but the mechanism of its release is stranger still. To The Stars was founded by Tom DeLonge, who used to ...”

“... behind by More. At times, he seems to have known exactly what lay ahead. In his History of King Richard III (1513), he wrote that ‘kings’ games ... were stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds.’ The ‘More part’, indeed. At other times, only we, in retrospect, can see how the ironies of this life buckle. Who else could have ...”

“... not the slightest hint of why Browning should have written it in the first place. Perhaps the old fox had a point after all. We have to start again, and aim at another point of vantage. Two stories are bound up in The Ring and the Book. One is the story on which the action of the poem is founded: the trial of Count Guido Franceschini for the murder of his ...”

“... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the instructions of our ...”

“... There also seems to be much more space devoted to practitioners of golf, cricket, rowing and fox-hunting than to professional footballers. By the time we reach the letter B, the tone of the volume is unmistakably established in two scrupulously mandarin pieces by Lord Trend on Bridges and Normanbrook, his predecessors at the Cabinet ...”

“... place. Taking counsel, they did the obvious thing and asked their saint to turn the thief into a fox. At once a vixen appeared with a cheese in its mouth, though the guilty monk was nowhere to be found. As such tales suggest, saints’ Lives reveal a tension between historicity and edification (or entertainment). Some vitae were begun while their subjects ...”

“... have been and are many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... time indicators such as ‘presently’ (lifted, according to his friend John Spurling, from Richard Hughes). And he renders his characters’ inner voices oddly, sometimes putting thoughts in quotation marks, sometimes using free indirect style and sometimes forgetting which of the two he’s doing. From time to time this makes people think in the wrong ...”

“... while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester Bangs. One of the founding members of the anarchist outfit Crass changed his name by deed poll in 1977 to Penny Rimbaud. Here were the Fall, and the Cure’s ‘Killing an Arab’. Nurse with Wound quoted ...”

“... me directly. The SIS assigned me a codename – Dark Knight – for use in our correspondence (Richard Butler, Unscom’s executive chairman, was Dark Prince). The sites for Unscom inspections were originally determined by declarations made by Iraq. In the first statements it provided to the UN, in April 1991, it underestimated its holdings of chemical ...”