“... His arrival at Harvard brought on homesickness and haemorrhoids. He roomed for three years with Christopher Lasch, later the social historian who wrote The Culture of Narcissism (of which Updike was arguably an exemplar; certainly many of his characters were, particularly Harry Angstrom). Begley quotes Lasch’s letters home about his roommate: ‘None of ...”

“... of England from Elizabeth’s reign to the outbreak of the Civil War. Its thesis often echoes Christopher Hill’s work on Puritanism and the more recent suggestions of Keith Wrightson, but Hunt finds a voice of his own. His concern is with ‘social puritanism’: with the ‘interpenetration’ of the ‘material and ideological causes’ of the Puritan ...”

“... In​ 2000 Christopher Sansom took a year off from his job as a solicitor to write a novel: it had occurred to him that the dissolution of the monasteries might make a good backdrop to a murder mystery. He finished it, sent it off and returned from holiday expecting a stack of rejections. ‘To my delight,’ he told the Guardian in 2010, ‘my email was hot with people wanting more ...”

“... lies drowned at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and stone of the bridge above her and passes into her body: ‘Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all.’ In the first story in Specimen Days, ‘In the Machine’, set at the height of New York’s industrial revolution, a young boy called ...”

“... he had genuinely believed he was doing the right thing in prosecuting her.She had fallen in love. Christopher Robinson was the first person she met after prison who saw her as ‘just Amanda’. He cooked her elaborate meals; she introduced him to her favourite books. They made co-ordinated costumes for Halloween parties and the historical re-enactment ...”

“... he is sighted in London in May 1612, giving evidence in a lawsuit involving his former landlord Christopher Mountjoy, and again in March 1613 when he signed the mortgage deed on a property in the Blackfriars.* The two performances in 1613 bring Cardenio close to the Shakespeare-Fletcher Henry VIII, which was first performed at the Globe in June 1613. It was ...”

“... maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an earlier full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling us that ‘it would be wrong … to ...”

“... rare visit to London during the war, for ‘something to go with my reptiliary – a seal pond – Christopher, wouldn’t it be fun?’ If Heathcote is fazed by the thought of further escaped inmates from my uncle’s neglected zoo, he doesn’t show it. The swans glide by; he climbs out of the mud; and looking, if possible, wilder than before, joins me on ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... In the Great War he was wounded five times, at the Battle of Loos and at the Somme. At Delville Wood he was hit in the thigh and pelvis and rolled down into a large shell-hole, where he lay for the next ten hours, alternately dosing himself with morphine and reading Aeschylus. He wrote home on 13 September 1916 that ‘the stench from the dead bodies which ...”

“... here is his ambition to write a new kind of English poem with what he described in his poem to Christopher Isherwood as a ‘strict and adult pen’. Elaborating on this, in his introduction to The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes characterises the sought-after new art as follows: ‘Auden was urging a kind of writing that would be ...”

“... that homes for heroes meant rehousing the whole of the working class: Not brick and tile, but wood, thatch, walls of mixed Material, and buildings in plain strength fixed. ... O better this sort of shelter – And villages on the land set helter-skelter On hillsides, dotted on plains – than the too exact Straight streets of modern times, that strait and ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... the grave. In some respects the most original and important contribution to Forward! is Frances Wood’s on 1964-79. The author has been a fully engaged Labour activist and conveys some of the pain and confusion which the movement suffered over devolution in the Seventies. Labour’s sketchy ‘National Plan’ had been scuppered by 1966, and its policies ...”

“... a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize ...”