“... when Vidal adds to or subtracts from earlier interpretations and legends. But even Civil War buffs may derive new ideas from this book, centring as it does on the politicians and civilians of devious, untrustworthy Washington. Readers of my own generation will remember all the pro-democratic propaganda of World War Two, derived from the Gettysburg ...”

“... librarian Ianthe Broome. The parish of St Basil, on the fringe of North Kensington in NW London, may not be classic Austen country, but the principal characters, all off-spring of deceased Anglican clergymen, might be the equivalents of Jane herself. Like any Austen novel, An Unsuitable Attachment makes a cluster of courtships an occasion to uncover the ...”

“... all, I do not see this. There are events, I speak of them, if I am to speak then it is these, if I may speak.’ This is the characteristically opaque ‘English’ idiom of Translated Accounts. Although the novel is written in English, it is not the English of native speakers: the 54 ‘accounts’ that make up the book are presented in the preface as having ...”

“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... and upbeat report, drafted at Balfour’s request by his predecessor Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author ...”

“... Party’s deputy chairman. Then the second disaster: he offers £2000 to a prostitute so that she may go abroad. The deal takes place at Victoria Station, where Archer’s proxy meets the prostitute, who is in league with the News of the World. The story breaks. Archer resigns as deputy chairman, but sues another tabloid, the Daily Star, for libel. The ...”

“... the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party – which to many close observers of Labour politics is actually the least likely thing on that list. The common factor explaining all these ...”

“... by that needless bristle at the end, a prickly little warning. Northern Ireland (for which you may of course read the ‘North of Ireland’) has 18 seats at Westminster, and has recently seen two events with significant political ramifications: the robbery of £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on 20 December, and on 30 January the murder of ...”

“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... 1931, or that Dudley Carew’s memoir, The House Is Gone, was published in 1949 by the firm of Robert Hale? Who is Dudley Carew anyway, and where does Taylor lay his hands on these remarkably recondite texts? Why should one begin a paragraph with the sentence, ‘After publishing his first novel, A Day in Summer (1963), J.L. Carr gave up his job as a ...”

“... at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One ...”

“... wife, what a terrific president he’s been for most of his first 16 months in office. Modesty may not be among his many virtues, but then ‘no one in this town is modest,’ and he is, as he constantly reminds people, the president of the United States of America. As the novel opens, he’s really up against it. The time is more or less now – or, to be ...”

“... a Jesuit boarding school in Belgium where he mixed with English students: his lifelong Anglophilia may have begun there. In Paris he found success and social connections. He was trained by former students of Ingres along with Degas, who became a close friend, and met Whistler while copying an Ingres at the Musée du Luxembourg. Portraits of high society and ...”

“... and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to ...”

“... and intermingled. Wiltshire rightly devotes close attention to the poem ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’ (in Johnson’s posthumously published Works ‘Dr’ was downgraded to ‘Mr’), first printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1783. In the lines ‘Nor, lettere’d arrogance, deny/Thy praise to merit unrefin’d’ it is hard not to see an ...”