“... on the Continent. In the early 17th century libraries of more than a thousand volumes were rare: Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury between 1604 and 1610, had perhaps the largest of the day at around six thousand volumes. A hundred years later, John Moore, bishop of Ely, had more than thirty thousand books. Moore’s collection is now a star of ...”

“... could be restored to integrity,’ says Harrison. Quite so, but Hitler and his green lieutenant Richard Walther Darre throve on that too. (Anna Bramwell’s work in this area is a conspicuous omission from the otherwise excellent bibliography, the length of which makes one pause to reflect on the number of trees which have been cut down in the cause of ...”

“... hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look on, say, Asians, as equals, he found it very tough to extend the same ...”

“... who were later to denounce it as obscene. Football is itself violent, of course – my friend Richard Wollheim once broke it to me that he was unable to look at a game, for this reason. But it has always distinguished between an allowable and an alien violence, and the rules it has for that purpose generally work. None of the really outstanding players ...”

“... in this way, Chamberlain was able to raise ‘news management’, in the words of the historian Richard Cockett, ‘almost to the level of an exact science’. Obviously, it’s a long march from making Lord Halifax look like an appeaser (which Harris might have pointed out he was already) to making Michael Heseltine look like a fool or a knave, which ...”

“... behalf. Structured in short episodic chunks, Slide focuses on the mid-life melancholy of one Richard Verey, a 35-year-old Englishman. Oxford-educated, old-shoe patrician, Verey is trying to recover pieces of a life that seems to have passed him by, beginning as a student on vacation in Iran. In a village outside Isfahan he buys a set of antique Russian ...”

“... Even readers who find the sentimentality of Murillo’s images of street arabs difficult to accept may be convinced by Brown’s account of the merits of, say, the moving yet dignified Return of the Prodigal Son, originally painted for the Hospital of Charity of Seville and now to be seen in the National Gallery, Washington. Brown goes so far as to claim that ...”

“... what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain amount of ballast) is here in The Life of My Choice, a treasure galleon built to the same specifications as Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. It is the record of a man magnificently and unabashedly out ...”

“... Castor does not discuss this part of her career) and then when she ruled England briefly for Richard I as queen mother. This type of queenship can also be glimpsed in Castor’s references to Stephen’s consort, another Matilda, who raised an army to support him after his capture, and was praised by the Gesta Stephani for forgetting a woman’s weakness ...”

“... chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations. Newly literate novel-readers in ...”

“... by the 19th century had turned into an exotic northern Arcadia for intrepid British travellers. Richard Burton, William Morris, Anthony Trollope, Mrs Alec Tweedie and Sabine Baring-Gould all trooped to the land of pumice and geysers. Most were ravished by the spectacle but all eventually had to come to terms with Iceland as a real country, struggling and ...”

“... which we require if we are to believe on similarly rational grounds that God does not exist may not differ from each other in significant ways. Generally, when questions of existence are in doubt, the onus of justification lies with those who maintain that something of such and such a kind does exist, and generally therefore it is reasonable to continue ...”

“... a personal memoir, while John Spurling discusses Farrell’s relations with Stendhal, Thomas Mann, Richard Hughes and Malcolm Lowry, and, by reproducing Farrell’s notes, indicates the general course the story was to have taken. Margaret Drabble writes on the comic undercutting, at their most solemn moments, of Farrell’s characters and their ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... Mine of Penny Kendrick and Robert Kettle is like a swarm of finches.’ When Ralph thinks he may be just an ‘instrument’, he is right in more ways than one. It’s this that should make questionable Fourth Estate’s rather opportunistic claim that Derek Beavan ‘tackles the issue of recovered memory’. In a way of course Ralph does sound like one ...”