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“... He found Benjamin Jowett’s Hegelised Plato a poor substitute for St Paul and skipped Matthew Arnold’s poetry lectures because they clashed with cricket matches. All the same, he thrived. He won a fellowship at Merton. He translated French roundelays and befriended Walter Pater. It was a world in which everybody seemed to know ...”

“... for nearly twenty years. All three items appear in the present Penguin anthology. Robertson Davies’s choice follows closely that of J.B. Priestley, but this is no doubt because large areas of the humorist’s works are undeniably dated. There is a generous helping from Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, the nearest he got to writing a novel, and also ...”

“... systems of 15 universities that were funded by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Project Agency. Matthew Zook tells the story well in The Geography of the Internet Industry (Blackwell, £19.99). The technology that made the network possible had been devised by Paul Baran in the US and Donald Davies in the UK, working ...”

“... bite in the UK: in one egregious example, the former political scientist of the radical right Matthew Goodwin was radicalised by his own subject matter, to the point where he now publishes YouTube videos about the ‘invasion’ of Britain and gives Reform stump speeches declaring ‘I want my country back.’) But although anti-migrant sentiment ...”

“... making it impossible for him to declare his Anglican beliefs as the job required. Like his friend Matthew Arnold, Clough was rescued by the rapid professionalisation of education. It offered what his increasingly accomplished and innovative poetry could not: a gentleman’s occupation, and the salary he needed in order to marry. But his post in the Education ...”

“... him of lacking imagination, and went so far as to doubt whether his works should be called poetry. Matthew Arnold took this line further, dismissing Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’. Attacks on Pope’s morals also continued in the 19th century: C.W. Dilke was shocked to discover that Pope had ‘cooked’ a few letters in his published ...”

“... Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s bibliography. But since sources documenting their clandestine lives are sparse, Harris invents his own ...”

“... story it was me. At 5.30 the next day Jamie arrived at my flat with his editorial colleague Nick Davies. (Mental health warning: there are two Nick Davies in this story. This one worked for Canongate; the second is a well-known reporter for the Guardian.) They had just come back on the train from Norfolk. Jamie said that ...”

“... of ‘atmosphere’ at Old Trafford: ‘it doesn’t seem as vibrant as the old days.’ David Davies, the FA’s head of public affairs, has made much the same complaint. The nouveau fans in corporate suites have no repertoire of songs outside Skinner and Baddiel’s shitty ditty. Much has been lost in the crack-down on ‘hooliganism’ – the hooligan ...”

“... in the leader columns. The paper was repeating a giddy pattern set in the autumn. On 28 October Matthew Parris, the politician turned journalist, said in passing to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that Mandelson was gay. He wasn’t breaking a confidence: the News of the World had outed the minister in the Eighties. But there had been no public reference to his ...”

“... as on the outdoor man.’ Sickert enjoyed making pronouncements – his most recent biographer, Matthew Sturgis, calls him ‘a man of strong opinions loosely held’ – and this one should be treated with some scepticism. A more significant factor keeping Sickert indoors was his temperament. A bit-part actor in his early youth, he practised a theatrical ...”

“... Forest, close to the base from which the surveillance helicopters take off, is closer still to Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum where John Clare, distracted by agricultural enclosures, was lodged. But it was the launcher site in Oxleas Wood, where locals had fought hard (and successfully) against motorway incursions, that I wanted to inspect. Leaning on ...”

“... eventual successor as president of the Royal Society (and Beddoes’s closest friend and adviser), Davies Giddy, and with other men. Her husband, who was passionate about everything but sex, had been relieved rather than annoyed, but that probably made her sense of guilt, after his premature death, no easier to bear, especially as she may have been half hoping ...”

“... and the other by a former bishop. Here one could quote, to some purpose, the actress Mandy Rice-Davies. Fifty-five years after Goebel’s book first came out it is still not clear who discovered the islands. It is doubtful if it ever will be. Goebel follows his energetic examination of all the known claims with an exhaustive account of why, in the light of ...”

“... It’s what was promised in return that one wonders about. But we have glimpses. When Gavyn Davies submitted a report on the future of broadcasting in 1999, it had various anti-Murdoch provisions and recommendations, none of which made it into law. When the House of Lords added an amendment to a communications Bill, threatening to ban ‘predatory ...”