“... betide Neil Kinnock or Roy Hattersley if he turns out to be a quintessentially decent fellow like Michael Foot. Churchill was not altogether decent, otherwise he would have been a lesser man. Gilbert records his magnanimous gestures, such as the considerate letters written to the dying Neville Chamberlain, or the glorious episode of the Bovril and ...”

“... a very unusual hour”, adding that it brought “a terror to living and writing”’. A.J.P. Taylor read the whole thing at least once a year, and ranked it as OUP’s greatest publication. Aficionados regularly recite Fowler on split infinitives, as if it were Monty Python on ex-parrots. And nearly seventy years after his death, letters for him still ...”

“... of ambition that coursed through Scargill’s veins. To my mind Scargill’s Scottish counterpart, Michael McGahey – a lifelong Communist and the leader of the Left until Scargill overtook him – was the more impressive figure, and this despite his unwavering support for the party line throughout the Stalin period and beyond. McGahey was humane, often ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in ...”

“... the writings of an unlikely set of predecessors: Edmund Burke, the eccentric Jeffersonians John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, Old School Presbyterian defenders of slavery, T.S. Eliot, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find ...”

“... thinker to reflect the Continental trend was Coleridge (although the isolated figure of Thomas Taylor had pointed the way in the 18th century). The early Utilitarians were too philistine to take much notice of Plato, but Mill studied him effectively, and Grote made him the subject of an important book, all the more valuable for being written from a ...”

“... anyone could come from anywhere and turn out to be Greta Garbo; indeed Fifties-pretty Elizabeth Taylor became Cleopatra and even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were ...”

“... make it tremendously intriguing. This new edition, introduced and heavily annotated by Michael Franklin, should be welcomed by both literary scholars and historians. A 1908 reprinting gave Hartly House the very apt subtitle ‘A Novel of the Days of Warren Hastings’. When the book originally appeared in 1789, Hastings’s defence team was busily ...”

“... of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of ‘sympathy’. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that ‘an almost complete turnabout in ...”

“... a hideous yacht. The romance went out of New Romanticism the minute the band’s bass player, John Taylor, in the video for the single ‘Rio’, crawled up the beach with a rifle to help a lady who was being splashed with champagne, followed quickly by their singer, Simon Le Bon, diving into the blue Antiguan waters wearing a pair of budgie smugglers. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these issues, Noll provides historical footholds for those such as the prominent Jungian analyst Michael Fordham who have raised serious questions as to what is really going on in a treatment that ultimately encourages the patient into active imagination with the promise that he or she will experience ‘the union of the opposites’. Or that urges patients ...”

“... at all. I confess to having hit this threshold of fact nausea by about page 183 of 597 in D.J. Taylor’s New Life, but I offer that as a criticism of myself rather than of this super-diligent book, and I did persist right to its end (spoilers: Orwell remarries on his deathbed and then dies of TB).Taylor has rewritten ...”

“... Quarterly saw what was going on, and Gifford killed The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, after Taylor and Hessey had twice reprinted it, far more effectively than was the case with his attack on Keats. Keats himself was enchanted by Hazlitt’s reply in the ‘Letter to William Gifford Esq.’ and copied pages of it in his journal-letter to his brother and ...”

“... the DPP’s office. It was drafted by the man in charge of the Ward case at the DPP’s office, Mr Michael Bibby. Bibby later told the Court of Appeal he had discussed the letter with the police before he sent it, but could not remember or name the officer he talked to. Earlier this year, I interviewed Mr Bourke for the Channel Four programme, Street Legal. Mr ...”