“... last year: Chris Mullin’s on the Birmingham case, Paul Foot’s on the Bridgewater case and then Robert Kee’s* on the Guildford case. Kee’s is a drier, less passionate book than the other two, partly because its prose is more visibly marked by the size-12 footprints of the libel lawyer. Once again we have a crime that cried out for vengeance, with its ...”

“... in word or in deed. They are doing a magnificent job, although the organisers of the experiment may well be having moral qualms about its effect in such areas as American energy policies and Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan. (Britain has presumably been the subject of a pilot experiment for the last thirty years). I find myself able to resist this hypothesis ...”

“... assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but ...”

“... drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?’ Ian Hamilton, the author of a fine biography of Robert Lowell, has made himself a connoisseur of the pitfalls of biography since the frustrations of his search for J.D. Salinger. In Keepers of the Flame (1992) he surveyed the legal and practical impediments: the prophylactic bonfire, the deathbed ...”

“... We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep, rich, fascinating and yes, often complex, past. We are mature enough as a society to understand that and to seek to pass it on, warts and all ...”

“... morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and ...”

“... husband; many people thought that she had meant to seduce Bywaters into doing so. ‘Illicit love may lead to crime,’ the judge instructed the jury, adding unconvincingly: ‘You must not, of course, let your disgust carry you too far.’ In her novel about the case, A Pin to See the Peepshow, F. Tennyson Jesse suggested that the crime for which Edith ...”

“... ominous gadgetry, the endless neon and rain. But Gibson – ‘very much under the influence of Robert Stone’, as well as Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs – was among the first to find a centre-stage role for information technology in his future scenarios. His stories were set in a world of porous borders, where multinationals and crime cartels had ...”

“... not left bereft, you know.’ And the conclusion is strangely upbeat: the future may be frightening for Fr Leahy, but only as it once was for those early Christian monks who rowed away into the unknown. All Trevor’s narrative gifts are evident in this story. The short paragraphs, cut and chiselled, are those of a puritan stylist. Vital ...”

“... that ‘evil intent’ should be strictly irrelevant to the definition and punishment of crime may have gained a hold in criminological circles, but there are few signs of its acceptance among the people at large (and its creeping penetration into sentencing procedures may well have helped to deepen widespread popular ...”

“... consumerism, an age whose dominant trope is anti-climax. ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’ may nonetheless seem to confirm the stock views of Marvell and Milton: Marvell stands apart from the sublime solemnity of his friend, ironically distancing himself from his achievements. According to T.S. Eliot, Milton’s Puritan republicanism destroyed his ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... is in for the kind of bashing which Posner delivers in one of his chapters to the writings of Robert Bork. President Reagan’s capable and ultra-conservative nominee for the Supreme Court whose rejection by the Senate resulted instead in the appointment of Clarence Thomas. Although legal literalism can crop up almost anywhere, its sharpest American ...”

“... and dates while denying what they were most anxious to convey: fear, horror and loathing. Sceptics may conclude that just as there was, to quote the exhibition’s accompanying book, a ‘19th-century view of the Vikings purely as raiders and killers’ – a view powered by the Victorians’ readiness to see themselves, their navy and the British Empire as a ...”

“... the editors of the three slim volumes that make up the collected Letters frankly tell us. Editors may be happy to leave it at that, but unfamilial biographers are less inclined to do so. Speculation is made to fill the blanks which Hallam Tennyson has created for posterity. Typically, the speculation shadows the spirit of the age. In 1904, influenced by Max ...”