“... British intelligence services in the Middle East and North Africa that are the subject of Martin Thomas’s immensely informed, meticulous and close-grained study not only had an interest in finding activities – unrest, subversion, proto-nationalism – which they then might surveil and suppress: they sought out precisely those activities that best suited ...”

“... with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the age of thirty. Ben ...”

“... almost nothing and nowhere to live, since they had at once to leave the flat over the chemist shop Thomas Gissing had owned. A local collection in Wakefield made it possible for George and his two younger brothers to go to a Quaker school in Cheshire, and he never really lived in Wakefield again after that. Gissing regarded his father’s death as the most ...”

“... regional press over a period of just four years.Court reporting has a long tradition in Britain. Thomas Grant, in his book about the Old Bailey, Court Number One (John Murray, £10.99), gives special credit to Rebecca West, who wrote about treason and spy cases from the 1940s to the 1960s, and Sybille Bedford, whose account of the trial of Dr Bodkin Adams in ...”

“... In the early summer of 1989 I started to take notes for a book which became The Infection of Thomas De Quincey and which was published in May this year. According to my notebook I began to do this a couple of weeks or so after the publication of ‘Too close to the bone’ in the London Review. The book takes off from De Quincey’s guilty sense of being ...”

“... the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became ...”

“... chose Remain in 2016, while 70 per cent of those who left school at 16 or younger voted Leave. As Thomas Piketty shows in his new book, Capital and Ideology, parties of the working class have been gradually morphing into parties of the educated all over the world, a shift that began around 1990.* But the expansion of higher education over the same period ...”

“... and what he is reading and wants to read. Yeats and Rilke dominate the talk of poetry. Edward Thomas, the figure behind the best poems in Raiders’ Dawn, is not mentioned. Lewis asks: ‘Will you copy for me Yeats’s poem “Solomon and the Witch” from the red Weekend Book … When I found it on the last morning I realised how much I needed it. And ...”

“... the newspaper account of a doubly fatal shoot-out in Boulder, Colorado between two men of mystery: William Seward Hall, a real-estate speculator and writer, and Mike Chase. Neither man shot his weapon (later we learn that Hall carried a 44 special action; Chase a 455 Webley; Burroughs loves guns). Both died simultaneously by rifle-fire from an unknown third ...”

“... language were ruder and less polished than those of their Continental counterparts. The translator Thomas Hoby called for writers to translate important works in order to enrich their own language, so that ‘we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in our tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our maners’. For Hoby and his ...”

“... in 1969, runs to almost nine hundred pages and includes more than a thousand poems. Of these William Wootten has culled 48, plus an extract from the late, long poem Winged Chariot. Each is followed by an astute and informative commentary that braids together relevant facts from de la Mare’s life, extracts from his other writings, and detailed attention ...”

“... unto his oth. Hit is pyté that he lyvyth!’ This indignant outburst by Sir Lancelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur has long been an embarrassment to admirers of the work and of its author. Ever since G.L. Kittredge, a hundred years ago, identified the author of Morte Darthur with Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold ...”

“... history and acknowledge that he had his own voice. The second reason is dubious. I agree with Thomas Kinsella’s view, in his Introduction to The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1986), that a ‘Northern Ireland Renaissance’ is ‘largely a journalistic entity’. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Deane, Michael Longley ...”

“... the cook, Sarah Reece, and two teenage housemaids, Emily Lunmir and Ethel Bailey. The eldest son, William, must have already moved out. In his will, my great-great-grandfather ‘desired it to be known that it was by the consent of his eldest son, William Corbett Roberts, who is already well provided for, that nothing is ...”

“... Coleridge does Dorothy ever reveal any resentment of the fact. Frugal and temperate as he was, William was not always demanding coffee ‘or something or other’, but he was not much use in the house, and at one of the many moments of domestic crisis Dorothy wrote to a friend that they hoped to ‘get William out of the ...”