“... can be used to defend anything, even the indefensible. The journalist turned politician Siôn Simon, once the most skilled and fearless of all Blair’s polemicists, now languishing on the back benches, offered the absurdist version when seeking to justify another of Blair’s pet projects, the grotesque and idiotic Millennium Dome. Writing in the Daily ...”

“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins ...”

“... I said. ‘Offences against the person.’ ‘Yes, that sort of lark. Plus I understand young Simon offered her the extra hundred a year.’ ‘Probably luncheon vouchers,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’ ‘Occam’s Razor shaves you closer,’ I said. I had only begun to suspect something when he began multiplying explanations. My foot shot out ...”

“... Simon Heffer​ has had an idea. He has had them before, but he has fattened this one up into a book of enormous proportions. Huge quantities of factual narrative have been injected into it, in the hope of beguiling reviewers into acknowledging its historical respectability. For all that, the underlying argument is simple – the title gives it away ...”

“... else – probably under torture – gave away Rée’s closest comrade and friend, young Jean Simon (‘Claude’), who was shot down in a Sochaux café. A double agent known as Max Foret betrayed the wireless operator John Young and the courier Diana Rowden (he was shot at Mauthausen; she met a dreadful death at the ...”

“... II, last of the Spanish Habsburgs: from his dead hands across an ocean, to the bound hands of John Williams, a minister of religion in Deerfield, a small settlement in New England. Europe’s conflicts are echoed and mimicked in this precarious, snow-bound frontier territory. The winter of 1703 to 1704 had been a season of ugly rumour, of a defensive ...”

“... his excellent television programmes. But thanks to some of the cooks cited in his bibliography – Simon Hopkinson, say, whose Roast Chicken and Other Stories (Ebury, £16.99) is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious ...”

“... here. This work, the result of five days’ collaboration in the basement of the Hôtel St Simon on the left Bank, has both oriental and occidental ancestry. The ceremonial meeting of poets to enact a ritual of elegance and refinement (more elegant and refined, perhaps, in nostalgic imagination than in humdrum reality) was admittedly an attempt to ...”

“... of the Great Powers, 1988 (subtitle, ‘Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500-2000’), or Simon Schama’s Citizens, 1989. At first glance it looks as if the reader gets a smaller return, a mere 15 years of history at a point when, on the face of it, nothing dramatic was happening. In fact, the big problems Johnson offers to explain prove ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... is not strictly true. There were at least two books written by historians in this period – Simon Schama’s Citizens and Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers – which reached a mass non-professorial audience. Kennedy’s book has, in fact, had a profound influence on political thinking in the United States. But what is more striking ...”

“... for a sense of human collectivity transcending individual claims – what Mazzini (following Saint-Simon) called the spirit of association. Verdi then – perhaps unconsciously – did write as a prophet of nationalism, though that sense of collective destiny could embrace more than the nation. How he developed after the failure of the 1848 revolutions is not ...”

“... first émigré period’. Even more damagingly, Field has evidently been forbidden to quote from Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), thus fatally impoverishing his account of the author’s most important literary relationship. (Karlinsky, incidentally, has his little say about Field’s ‘enormous blunders’ in the preface to ...”

“... application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 books, was, in a way, worldlier and more comfortable, finding nests at the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with ...”

“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”