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“... speech, and singleness of eye. So the Tudors had been left to poets and novelists – Schiller, Scott, Southey – and the French historian François Mignet, whose highly romanticised Histoire de Marie Stuart appeared in 1851. British historians wrote about ancient Greece and Rome, the Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-Saxon and post-Reformation England. The ...”

“... as deep in the past as those files of the Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to ...”

“... show buildings that are still quite recognisable today; pictures of the ‘Cromwell curve’, with John Fowler’s concrete bridge of 1867-9, are evidence of the scale of engineering work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how ...”

“... hand over’ – for example, a city or prisoners of war – and which, according to Liddell and Scott, can also mean ‘to betray’. Klassen disputes this, and claims there is no instance in classical Greek, or in the Greek of Josephus, contemporary with the Gospels, or in the Gospels themselves, where the word means ‘betray’. Yet of the 44 times ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... mischievous matchmakers, innocent fun, uileann pipes, sea-wind in the hair. Even if you swap John Ford’s Ireland for something more urban and contemporary, say that of Roddy Doyle, in which a good night out is more likely to involve soul music and a ‘ride’, it is still possible to find yourself idealising: Ford and Doyle (pre-Paddy Clarke and ...”

“... up a long tradition of heroic gestures and wasted lives in frozen places (Franklin, Shackleton, Scott), but also the millions of less celebrated deaths in the Great War. The war hardly needed to be mentioned because it was always there. Mallory looked on the second expedition as ‘more like war than sport’, and time and again the natural desolation of ...”

“... One time in four, and usually to everyone’s surprise, John Cheever’s heroes spring a wry and furtive victory over disappointment. Cheever is irresistible in describing those delicious moments of triumph when a dogged loser suddenly strikes a home run – like Farragut’s escape from the penitentiary at the end of Falconer ...”

“... and ‘Vigorous’ Gothic mannerism of men such as S.S. Teulon, as well as the secular Gothic of Scott and Butterfield. It was also valuable for its discussion of the origins of the domestic styles of Nesfield and Shaw, and for dealing at length with the work of George Devey, that recondite designer of genuine Jacobean houses for Liberal politicians. Dr ...”

“... similar equalities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristan-esque trip-taking.’ Now comes Scott Hicks’s Shine, an equally arty but commercially viable biopic about a man – David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush, Noah Taylor and Alex Rafalowicz) – who is abnormally inarticulate. Helfgott’s very first words are: ‘Kissed them all, I kissed ...”

“... vicious ambiguity: what was done to her? Or, what has she done to herself? After Colin Dexter and John Thaw’s Inspector Morse, Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Rachel raises the tradition of the alcoholic detective to a new level. The novel’s main protagonist spends most of her time on train journeys, with no ...”

“... of the erratic, often inebriated behaviour of Carson McCullers, a literary prodigy to set beside Scott Fitzgerald in the previous generation. (McCullers, married to a bisexual man, was frequently enamoured of women who sometimes, but more often didn’t, welcome her effusive advances.) Of the trio, Flannery O’Connor, who published her first novel Wise ...”

“... Toward the end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s steady conception of his relation to Carlyle, the older man by 24 years ...”

“... in the wake of Aids. How close is the analogy with syphilis in the field of public health? G.R. Scott argues – also in Aids and the Epidemics of History – that the present state of knowledge about Aids parallels that of syphilis in the Twenties or Thirties: the cause of the disease and the means of transmission are understood, he asserts (perhaps too ...”

“... recently with a Cabinet Minister will know that it is not just the labourer who is thus incapable. John Buchan, whose grandson I am, was a late and flesh-and-blood representative of that lost epoch before economic expediency: a writer who not so much rejected the division of labour (Baudelaire and the Romantics do that) as overcame it. He fascinated his age ...”