“... But it was ‘Mary Borden’ who wrote in Journey Down a Blind Alley, what, for my money, is the best thumbnail sketch of the man who had harried and harassed her husband and snubbed her. The Spearses had a son, Michael, a permanent invalid, and, at this time, an undergraduate at Oxford. At Christmas 1939, his plans having gone wrong, de Gaulle was welcomed ...”

“... developed in tandem – but with a more exhibitionistic cleverness; and again the failure, or, at best, distortion, of communication between fathers and children is witness to the compromise of ideals – often an ideal of nature – which should have transmitted themselves in a sense of the past. The narrator Prentis works in a police archive where a part of ...”

“... of Durham in death than in life. Cuthbert was also the name of the 16th-century bishop who did his best to steer the cathedral through the early Reformation: the thoughtfully traditionalist theologian and mathematical writer Cuthbert Tunstall (‘Dreaming Durham’, they called him at the time). It is through the prism of Durham, with its generous archive ...”

“... Yizhar Smilansky, who wrote under the pen-name of S. Yizhar, was the best of the Israeli prose writers for whom Hebrew is a first language, as distinct from those who emigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe. Though he was never a celebrity, either in Israel or internationally, his death in 2006 occasioned a handful of translations of his work into English ...”

“... musicians from London, even the most glamorous stars, played alongside local professionals and the best of the local amateurs. Marsh met and played with many of the leading musicians of his day, and even occasionally heard his own music performed by them. In the first half of his life, he was a tireless composer, writing anthems, glees, works for organ, string ...”

“... perhaps thrown into sharpest relief when set beside a deeply uncommitted, agnostic poetry – the best of Stevens, say. For a start, its art is rooted confidently in, rather than groping hesitantly towards, a ‘supreme fiction’. An art of uncertainty inevitably enlists very different ways of keeping us interested, which include, in Stevens’s case, enough ...”

“... taste in food (Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney puddings, heated up in a pan). George has spent the best part of his adult life abroad: first in the Navy; then, after his demob in 1946, in Aden, as ship’s bunkerer (‘just like being a sort of maritime petrol pump attendant’ is how he describes it); and finally, for the last twenty-five years or so, in Bom ...”

“... acknowledges this bleaker story, but carefully arranges his sources to present the British in the best possible light. His triumphal narrative of British freedom concludes in a joyous scene: in New York Harbour in 1783, thousands of freed slaves burst into song as they boarded British vessels taking Loyalists (black and white) into permanent exile. Rough ...”

“... issues such as climate change and immigration. Pat Robertson, who is probably the country’s best-known evangelical now that Falwell has died, declared himself a ‘convert’ on the issue of global warming last summer, insisting that ‘we really need to address the burning of fossil fuels.’ Even on immigration, an issue that traditionally unites ...”

“... I am wholly preoccupied with the war between England and the Transvaal,’ Tsar Nicholas wrote to his sister at the outbreak of the Boer War. ‘Every day I read the news in the British newspapers from the first to the last line . . . I cannot conceal my joy at . . . yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full British battalions and a mountain battery were captured by the Boers!’ Britain’s hold on South Africa was significant for the Russians partly because the route to India lay via the Cape, and as Governors of the Cape were only too aware, Russia had its own designs on India ...”

“... to the ordinary function of things which had acquired stunning power as works of art. Which is why Nicholas Thomas’s Oceanic Art, despite its ethnographical bias, appears in a World of Art series and why questions of what is and is not art keep intruding. As Thomas points out, over-confident label-writers and catalogue-makers are liable to impose meanings on ...”

“... Two of them, The Promise of Happiness and The Child and the Book, aim at comprehensiveness. Only Nicholas Tucker mentions Hugh Lofting who wrote the Dr Dolittle series, and the Index entry reads: ‘Lofting, Hugh, racialism’; only Tucker, and he only in passing, mentions The Borrowers and its sequels. No one mentions the Orlando books. No one mentions Noel ...”

“... very often) he emerges as a crusted reactionary, a Thatcherite to beat all Thatcherites. He loves Nicholas Ridley and the Poll Tax, favours identity cards for football supporters, detests trade unions which behave like trade unions and not as satraps of the employers. He constantly rants against ‘NHS officials, teachers and all who would dip their hands ...”

“... Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass ...”

“... Russia’s military strength and called on France to match his exertions. In July 1914 he assured Nicholas II that the army was ready to fight. ‘Never before had Russia been as well prepared for war as it was in 1914,’ he would write in his memoirs. Within a year, initial Russian successes had turned into a full-scale retreat that brought German and ...”