“... a kitchen porter masquerading as a dentist who lived off his partner’s earnings as a prostitute. Paul Buckwaldt adopted the alias ‘Sherlock Holmes’. And Karl Hentschel – ‘such a nuisance’ in Steinhauer’s view – repeatedly blackmailed the German Secret Service by threatening to reveal the identity of his own source to the British ...”

“... emigration to America, and his sense of himself as a writer. Not the kind, as he says of Angus Wilson, who ‘proudly calls your attention to every single God-damned nuance’, but a ‘“reassuring” type of writer’ who ‘takes you by the hand and leads you step by step from a familiar into an unfamiliar situation’. Isherwood knew from his own ...”

“... peace in the early hours of the morning while playing a drunken game of bicycle polo with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He insisted that behaving this way was his birthright and that he had merely been entertaining those he had woken up. What made all the difference was war and the Guards. All four joined up, keen to do their duty but also to see action; the ...”

“... allowed to say that we value A la Recherche for its life (the extremely hostile literary mandarin Paul Souday admitted that if one can bring oneself to plunge in ‘one does not let go’ because its ‘prolixity ... always conveys the feeling of life’) and for its humour, its marvellous and endlessly discriminatory sense of the ridiculous. But because it ...”

“... is all there in the photographs: the ship’s cook Walrus Oakenbough playing a flute; cetologist Paul Spong on his bunk, consulting the I Ching, and so on. But it also showed pictures of the crew in motorised rubber dinghies playing chicken with the whale-chasers, quite literally saving whale lives by getting between the harpoon and the whale. Lamb’s book ...”

“... but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science available to ...”

“... a style is how easy it is to parody. Pevsner’s is more difficult than it looks. It defeats A.N. Wilson in Who Was Oswald Fish?, as Simon Bradley points out in a wide-ranging essay on ‘Pevsner in Fiction, Theatre and Cinema’. Imitation even of the most laconic entries is difficult. Only Alan Hollinghurst, among Bradley’s examples, gets it nearly ...”

“... October 1940 which so irritated Churchill that he exerted his influence in getting them cancelled. Paul Addison’s book The Road to 1945, published fifty years ago, argued that Orwell and Priestley’s rhetoric indicates that ‘the summer of 1940 saw a decisive popular shift to the left in Britain, a “new deal at Dunkirk”,’ and that military failure ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”

“... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... John Bull turns round to look at you, you are not well-dressed,’ he observed to Harriette Wilson, ‘but either too stiff, too tight, or too fashionable.’ Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing make-up, enormously high shirt collars, stiff lapels on their coats and corsets to produce ...”

“... denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a ...”

“... rewriting Don Quixote word for word, and his version turns out to be better than the original. Paul Auster, in the New York Trilogy, follows the logic of detection into dizzy madness. But these clevernesses aren’t just sparked by the idea: they are affected by detective fiction’s glamour. And much of this glamour comes from film, and most of that from ...”

“... a harsh reassessment. Carlyle had earlier translated the whimsical German Romantic novelist Jean Paul Richter, lyrical and discursive by turns, a major influence on Sartor Resartus, and Marx now noted and deplored the pervasive effect on Carlyle’s style of this ‘literary apothecary’. Anthony Trollope and Edward Fitzgerald thought Carlyle had finally ...”