“... Black Mischief, another old Chapman & Hall first, no dj, but handsome mottled brown boards.’ We may choose to believe Richard Rayner, as he presents himself to us raw: ‘Perhaps we all have this dream, to tell everything and yet not forfeit love – the only sinner not to be roasted.’ What he’s admitting to, though, is not a series of ...”

“... gust of wind at a review was not. This misfortune befell the Duke of Wellington in Hyde Park on a May day in 1829. Much of the blame lay with his Guards bearskin cap, nearly two feet high, which he was wearing instead of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers ...”

“... comedy of ordinary happiness where there appears to be all the time in the world. In Ariel nothing may have quite happened yet, but no aspiration seems implausible, whether it is Uncle Wheels’s ambition to win a national bike race, or Red Head’s to be a draughts champion. In Wheels’s case the family have already decided that he’s the victor, while Red ...”

“... Greek world is a third world; if you want to know (say) about its infant mortality, UN statistics may supply a model. The Greek world is a Mediterranean world, and in many respects (nutrition, transport) the world of Philip II of Macedon will have borne a strong likeness to the world of Philip II of Spain; since Braudel had more material, he ...”

“... Sam Wanamaker’s replica of the Globe Theatre on the South Bank. As Schwartz concludes, we may profess to admire the unique, but our first response is usually to try to reproduce it. Why? Identical twins offer an initial clue. Their doubleness sets an ideal of warm mutual sympathy against the icy individualism urged on us by contemporary economics and ...”

“... the Teacher Training Agency, John Patten’s attempt to gain control of the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ...”

“... of Athenian democracy or Spartan aristocracy; whereas there is a good deal to suggest that he may have approved of a limited form of monarchy. According to his friend Greville, who may have been back-projecting his own Jacobean preoccupations, Sidney had feared that the political consequence of the French marriage would ...”

“... a gentlemanly job, and began his sea career immediately after leaving Hawkshead Grammar School. It may have been a peculiarity of the Wordsworth family that whereas the other sons sought employment and preferment in the ordinary way, it was assumed that the poet was owed a living from the outset. In The Prelude Wordsworth celebrates the freedom conferred by a ...”

“... but there are clear signs that its leaders are worried about climbing on the Taliban tiger. They may be rigidly puritanical in their ideology, but they are the kind of rigid puritans who in British and American politics have often proved remarkably flexible when it comes down to accepting government jobs and forming alliances. Munawar Hassan, the Jamaat’s ...”

“... resumes his research with the hard-won and incompletely convincing insight that biography itself may be a kind of snuff movie. What is this novel saying about biographers and biographies? When the first thirty or so pages of The Biographer’s Tale were first published (in New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting ...”

“... posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and food, ...”

“... of food vouchers worth £35 a week. ‘Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery,’ explains the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien, ‘and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.’ ‘Is the minister suggesting,’ asks Diane Abbott MP, ‘that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their ...”

“... with folk or even fairy tale in ways that are not easy to sort out. Peele’s questing knight may primarily evoke the world of romance, but that is not his only habitat. Jack, and the maidens at the well, certainly suggest folk tale but without being confined to it. Delia, Venelia, the were-bear and the magician Sacrapant who persecutes them could be ...”

“... off the stage, British politics (or perhaps one should say English politics, since Scotland may be going its separate, but equally parochial way) will be in the hands of a generation of late thirty and early fortysomethings, almost all of whom went to the same university at roughly the same time and studied the same subject. As well as the two ...”

“... The boat ramming is as likely, they think, to be socialising and play as anything else. The orcas may simply have found a fun new pastime, and might just get bored of it one day, like the salmon hats or porpoise bullying. The really remarkable thing about the boat-ramming is that it is happening at all. Not because ambiguous or even apparently aggressive ...”