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“... Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly abandoned it after the death of his father. He describes his youth as full of the usual ‘vanities’ – fashions, feasts, amorous dalliances. These, we are led to believe, took place before he ...”

“... had to check,’ she said. Listening to her talk of her fears about Iraq and compare the loss of young men to the devastations of the First World War, my eye fell on an open bible next to her. The passage was from Luke: ‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... forward over Peru’s apocalyptic years, from 1965 to 1986. At the starting-point a philosophical young revolutionary, Gabriel Lung (he has Chinese blood), falls in love with Elena Silves (she has Portuguese blood). Elena has a religious vision and performs a confirmatory miracle. She is imprisoned by the authorities in a convent. Gabriel becomes a ...”

“... in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James (1986); Michael Anesko in ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (1986); Rayburn Moore in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s ...”

“... philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the Duke of Windsor himself, to say nothing of the Duchess. Sarah Bradford’s biography of George VI portrayed him as the ultimate sacrificial ...”

“... of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made ...”

“... and lacked true Fascism’s social radicalism.’ On the other hand, Gastone Spinetti, the young Italian Fascist who tried to revive the revolutionary and youth-oriented side of Italian Fascism in the Thirties had no doubt that the Falangists were true Fascists. Michael Ledeen writes in Universal Fascism that ...”

“... now trying to do. The results are extremely impressive, especially with those contributors (like Michael Lapidge on ‘The Stoic Inheritance’) who are prepared to go right back to the beginning and to explain not only what the Middle Ages did inherit, but also what they (and we) have lost. Yet a doubt hangs over the whole exercise, voiced by Dronke ...”

“... it got just 28 per cent. But even in 1987, with party political videos to remind the nation that Young Upwardly-Mobile Kinnocks – ‘Yuk-kies’, Jenkins can’t resist suggesting – had displaced the wild-eyed patricians, it got only 32. Neil Kinnock had said that to ‘lose badly’ was to come in with less than 250 seats. The Party won just 229. The ...”

“... not one of laziness or deficiency, however; it is one of deliberate choice. As his brother William Michael pointed out very early, while Rossetti was well aware that correct perspective was ‘required in order to make a picture conformable’ to accepted standards, ‘the fact is that he is preferred the tone of mind which governed the treatment of such ...”

“... chapter, ‘Going down fighting’. This ‘life and times’ examines Scargill’s personal rise: Young Communist militant; Area Council delegate at the age of 26; compensation agent in 1972 at the age of 34, having just attained national prominence in the ‘battle of Saltley gates’; Yorkshire president a year later; national president in ...”

“... structure and life of our family units are changing. Marriage is popular – often contracted at a young age, and often not very durable. But in spite of the present ease of entering and leaving wedlock, 16 per cent of births, 99,000 children a year, are illegitimate. Yet only three and a half thousand of these come on the adoption market. A lot of family life ...”

“... for more traditional school syllabuses or by more conventional behaviour on the part of the young. But all of that is happening on a more modest scale. It could become less modest if there was a real threat to the stability of society – for instance, from an escalation of inner-city rioting. But for the moment the shift has been not from Progress to ...”

“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”