“... The world, the flesh and the devil keep coming back, and must be rejected again and again. George Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s ...”

“... Overt, a ‘student of fine prose’, is keen to learn what he can from an older writer, Henry St George. Early in the story, Overt meets St George’s wife. He ‘would never have taken the important little woman in the aggressively Parisian dress for the domestic partner of a man of letters’, James writes. Such wives ...”

“... suspect culture of science was a more obvious target for the sour provincialism of F.R. Leavis. Andrew Brown’s J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science is better at satisfying biographical than historical curiosity. It is not the first book based on the Bernal Archive, now in the Cambridge University Library, but it gives us more of the facts than all its ...”

“... next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the ...”

“... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the ...”

“... states? The answer lies, of course, in the recent history of the culture wars and in George W. Bush’s clear identification with the militancy of the Christian Right. Bush plausibly and successfully campaigns as the Christian plain man voicing the grievances of the common people against the pampered liberalism of an elite typified by John ...”

“... with the auction catalogue, which lists slaves by name, age and skill. The first entries read: ‘George, age 27, prime cotton planter; Sue, age 26, prime rice planter; George Jr, age 4, boy child; Harry, age 2, boy child.’ Listings for 432 other slaves follow. Another indispensable source is a 28-page pamphlet published ...”

“... New York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and investigation, for the six months we laboured side by side in Minsk and Moscow, and then again in ...”

“... the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic situations just fizzle out.’ This is close to George Eliot’s thoughts about the tragedy that lies in ‘the fact of frequency’, and it is what happens in The Grand-Dad. The executioner is robbed of his victim, the aristocrat is robbed of a stagey death, and the audience is robbed of the sort of finality ...”

“... populist figurehead is the incarnation of the People and their cause – consider such examples as Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace and Donald Trump.Populism is only rarely about class in a direct way. Its left-wing version does not necessarily entail self-organisation by the working classes but their ...”

“... was Max Aitken, still only forty but already – despite the private objections of George V – sitting in the Upper House as Lord Beaverbrook and considered indispensable by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The First World War had established him as a ‘press lord’, controlling the Express empire, as ...”

“... Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedrooms at Chatsworth. ‘I wish he’d leave a copy in all the bedrooms,’ drawls ...”

“... assassinations and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up ...”

“... the prints are grouped by the authors of the paintings on which they are based, the room – and Andrew Wilton’s excellent essay on this aspect of the show – invites us to focus on the printmakers, especially the French Protestant immigrant François Vivares, and the brilliant William Woollett, who became the finest, the most intricate and industrious ...”

“... of Ian Fleming’s later novels and from his showdowns with the Bonds played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore. (Copyright issues prevented any showdowns with Bond as played by Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan.) Craig’s Bond is tougher than any of his predecessors – a thug Bond who looks like he drinks more protein shakes than martinis ...”