“... of sounding out the margins for Thatcherite echoes was not so original after all. This was Angie Walker of BBC London News. She’d been quite chuffed to be asked to cover the funeral, picturing a prime spot in Westminster, on the Strand, if not inside St Paul’s – only to learn that they had banished her to Tilbury Town. Wherever that proved to be, it ...”

“... riven with ideological dispute and internecine factionalism faces electoral disadvantages. As John Barnes brings out in his urbane essay on ideology and factions, Conservative ideology has rested in part on a scepticism about the adequacy of ideology itself. In this sense, neither the fervent Tariff Reformers of the early part of the century, nor the ...”

“... At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone. Fanny Burney, who commenced a journal at the age of 15, gave as her reason that ‘when the hour ...”

“... to her reputation as a great beauty. Certainly, it is not a flattering portrait, of the kind that John Singer Sargent was producing for a satisfied clientèle. If we compare it to a slightly later Sargent portrait – Lady Agnew, for example – we find the pose of Cassatt’s subject far more rigid, the costume and decor more severe; the tell-tale signs of ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... comedie’. In similar fashion he began his earlier Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrell (another exorcist, but a Protestant one this time) with the invocation: ‘open the curtaine, and see their Puppettes play.’ Harsnett’s point is that a ritual which seems to manifest supernatural power is no more than a play. Greenblatt’s ...”

“... a cure for cancer and Aids. Phillipe Petit, on the other hand, was genuinely strange. A high-wire walker who is artist in residence at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, he is described, with a simpering smile from Dr Guntern, as conquistador of the useless. Petit is a tiny, frail man who looks like a haggard ...”

“... the dog, and an empty spud bag to take up the shite’ remind us that we are not in the world of John Banville. The odd reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the fact that there are immigrants around and a young woman, saying, ‘I was just like Oh my God,’ alert the reader with a mild shock that the novel is set in 2006, not 1906. As frequently in ...”

“... like a Venetian courtesan in a period of acqua alta, or forced to balance like a tightrope walker on feet encased in hulking armadillo shoes, which did for his runway models what pointe shoes did for ballerinas after Marie Taglioni first stuffed her ballet slippers. But while Taglioni became an ethereal fairy, the armadillo shoes and fabric sheaths ...”

“... missiles would make both merchant ships and surface warships dangerously vulnerable. (John Nott, for one, was persuaded.) The Americans assumed that the Russians were aiming for a great fleet battle – what other purpose could a large navy have? – but a battle fought largely by submarines and aircraft. Only later did it become clear that the ...”

“... homespun textiles or portraits by black artists? In Liverpool this led to gradual changes at the Walker Art Gallery, whose collection includes about three dozen Renaissance paintings once owned by Roscoe. The International Slavery Museum, which opened in 2007, lent the gallery Lost Soul VI by Zak Ové, a carnival-costumed black child from his Moko Jumbie ...”

“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... think of, and in content embraced pretty much everything from the jazz and stockings and Johnnie Walker of Autumn Journal (1939) to the budgies and television monitors of The Burning Perch (1963). He believed that poetry was a flexible instrument; it could be reportage or narrative, philosophical or symbolist, parabolic or oneiric. If the poems show that he ...”

“... state in waiting, ‘indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself’, as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of ...”