“... the Channel to begin coining money in Antwerp. On 17 July, the bank’s first deputy governor, Michael Godfrey, eager to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you ...”

“... busy don, Sillery) to the more intellectual atmosphere of Balliol, he met Logan Pearsall-Smith, author of Trivia. The great man read an essay by Mackenzie called ‘The Undergraduate’s Garden’ and delivered his verdict: ‘Yes, yes, you have it in you. The authentic note of English prose sounds from time to time.’ That was just the trouble. The ...”

“... and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot and ...”

“... at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad. Lady Stansgate gives another insight on the boys’ upbringing: ‘They used to pretend they were workmen called Bill and Jim ...”

“... director of the White Star Line, who according to the script insisted that the ineffective Captain Smith, emblem of Britain’s exaggerated sense of its seafaring skill, drive his ship at full speed through an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... by casual pay-offs and unsurprising resolutions. Equally garrulous, but without the charm, Michael Horovitz’s Growing Up gives us his ‘Selected Poems and Pictures 1951 – 79’. The jacket of the book is crammed with testimonials, the way a Steinberg document carries paragraphs of flamboyant, but meaningless, calligraphy. Ginsberg, Beckett and ...”

“... Village because nothing ever happens there.’ Perry Scholes, the protagonist and narrator of Michael Symmons Roberts’s first novel, Patrick’s Alphabet, is obsessed with Weegee. Perry is a modern ambulance chaser who patrols the suburban ‘edgelands’ of the M4 corridor and the M25 in self-conscious imitation of the master. He tunes in to the police ...”

“... book, Writing Degree Zero, with Elements of Semiology, was translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith in 1967, and this volume is now reissued. The Fashion System appears in English for the first time, and Barthes’s solemnity here looks more and more like a deadpan act, or a feat of self-discipline, or perhaps both: Buster Keaton at the ...”

“... represents a refusal of the whole idea of the castle’s order. Peake told his friend Gordon Smith that reading Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader had made him ‘enormously dejected (in the right sort of way, I think) over Titus Groan’. I feel that what I’m ‘after’ has to a large extent been forgotten while I wrote. What was I after anyway? I ...”

“... her real father and got Davis to adopt her. She began to lose her puppy fat. And she enrolled in Smith College – like all the so-called Seven Sisters, something of a finishing school for young ladies from the East Coast’s upper middle class. At this point, though, Kelley’s thesis (and it is her only one) that Nancy, like her mother, was an all-out ...”

“... magazine editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ...”

“... Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style here but ...”

“... an attempt to recreate the Virginia colony of the early 17th century through the story of John Smith and Pocahontas. This entailed careful research on appearance, language and Powhatan tribal customs. But the little we know of that time has been Hollywood-ised in the movie. Colin Farrell makes a brooding but vague ...”