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“... of expression’. Now English poetry, dormant since Chaucer and Lydgate, got to its feet and sang. John Leland, a friend of Wyatt’s youth, later wrote: ‘The English tongue was rude, its verses vile/Now, skilful Wyatt, it has known your file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do ...”

“... called Animals, and in one edition, I think in 1968, a thrilling article by the ornithologist John Gooders described how he’d seen two hundred species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those ...”

“... a thousand times more ancient than the Judaeo-Christian ethic.’ If anything other than boredom took Clark into politics, it was surely a ‘man of destiny’ fixation. ‘What does the future hold for me? How far will I go?’ But he also fears that this moment may have passed. Several entries here are given over to his ‘collapsing looks and ...”

“... bridled. ‘We were painters! And more than painters! We lived with our subjects. We observed, took notes, recorded. Prue and I painted scores and scores of the most famous people in Dublin, from memory, from notes on my cuffs, little sketch blocks hidden in her purse, at first nights in the theatre, at marriages and funerals, at the races, at the Vice ...”

“... brittle. She was mocking, brash, hoity-toity. What she never was, in her films, was silent. John Ford admired her ‘strange, sharp face’ which made Tennessee Williams think of ‘a medieval saint in a Gothic cathedral’. Her voice has been described as ‘nasal’, ‘metallic’, and by one biographer as ‘a cross between Donald Duck and a ...”

“... praising it to the skies (and then grounding a few objections), I need to declare an interest. John Lennard says in his acknowledgments that he is in debt to me. Nothing like as much as I (and many others to come) now stand in debt to him, but his IOU had better be spelt out. First, that in some measure he took off from ...”

“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... tongue that lacks numerals (even ‘one’) and cannot or will not formulate such recursions as John’s brother’s house (allegedly, too, it lacks sentence-embedding, although it often achieves the same results through verbal suffixes), and Riau Indonesian, in which the lack of grammatical markers and the flexibility of word order reportedly allow both ...”

“... Britain’s recovery from the American War; he was good for much of the 1790s, when he initially took a calm view of the French Revolution and coped well with the tribulations invariably suffered by British politicians and generals at the onset of major wars; unlike his father, however, war was not his métier. In the 1800s he was poor, mishandling the issue ...”

“... he was lucky to miss), he was taken into the royal council of King Philip VI. With the next king, John II, who ascended the French throne in 1350, he came to be on very close terms. He was one of the Knights of the Order of the Star, founded by John in 1352 and which that king hoped would revive French chivalry after its ...”

“... First, let me declare a disinterest. John Lanchester and I are both involved, in different ways, with the London Review of Books, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another. Now that’s out of the way, onto the novels. Lanchester’s first, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), begins: ‘This is not a conventional cookbook’ – a more interesting way of saying that it is an unconventional novel ...”

“... duties; and Stevenson’s competence at her job (not to mention the fact that she looked, as John Campbell notes, ‘too prim to be anything so improper as a mistress’) warded off suspicion. But the real reason this triangular relationship endured unmolested was surely that, in some crucial sense, all three principals played by the ...”

“... kind about my sister … But he began to shake my arms and legs, while making a hissing noise.’ John Holms, the writer Peggy starts sleeping with in the dying days of her marriage, protects her from her husband, but only through more of the same. ‘“I’ll kill him,” he said blithely, turning on his side and tapping my nose.’The novel’s ...”

“... befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own ...”

“... of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her protestations would convince the world that John, as she calls him, was not guilty. It doesn’t work, even though one agrees that the coroner’s verdict naming Lucan as the murderer was unfairly reached, and it must have been a heartbreaking task. Marnham’s book is more reflective and very much ...”