“... mind is the great poem of winter’, demanding the destruction of ‘romantic tenements/Of rose and ice’. But it is also the poet who seems, as one turns the pages of this volume, to have been preparing all his life for the phrase ‘fire-tangled’ which appears at the end of the poem I am about to quote. ‘These comic colors dangled down,’ we ...”

“... became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’) has of course left its mark here as elsewhere, notably in the form of one-way systems of the kind Birmingham recently took to their logical conclusion when the city was turned into a race-track. But despite all the free demolition work by the two rival firms, the Seventies have dealt ...”

“... out of your life carries less of a stigma than lager or Grand Theft Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet reading, like every other exercise of the imagination, can be abused, can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been ...”

“... customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want unwittingly to take the same one out again, thus wasting her fee). In her shopping basket her swag, swiped furtively from the shelves, would be buried under the groceries. It was difficult to know what to do with ...”

“... Lewis, nursing his obsessive and in some ways unspeakable grief for his lost daughter, with Joe Rose, with Leonard Marnham, with June Tremaine, and with Briony in Atonement, of whom McEwan writes that she felt she lacked secrets, and could not have an interesting life without them. ‘The distortion of a text,’ Freud says in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is ...”

“... seemed to me a small watercolour belonging to Tate Britain, entitled – usually with a question mark – Los and Orc. Identities, even if here the two names from Blake’s mythology seem to apply, are difficult. Let us agree to call Los the figure of imaginative and political energy in human history as Blake conceived it, and Orc that same energy taking ...”

“... with the staple industries stagnating and over two million people out of work, Harold Macmillan rose in the Commons to press for a radical policy of industrial reconstruction and public investment. What, he asked, were the arguments against public capital expenditure? ‘What is the case of the Treasury, the people who really govern England from the Box ...”

“... and likes, all of whom he assumes are repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have and a masculine ideal he can’t measure up to. Poer’s face is smooth where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is ...”

“... of the enshrined practices of the Athenian and Roman republics by Philip of Macedon and Mark Antony (although those of Demosthenes were calls to arms rather than constitutional critiques).There are at least six books now in print with the words ‘Assault on Truth’ in their titles: Oborne’s; Jeffrey Masson’s polemic against the slipperiness of ...”

“... 2003. In early 2007, he heard about the death in Mosul of a young soldier from California called Mark Daily, who had left behind a statement explaining his reasons for having volunteered to fight. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Daily had thought hard about a war whose justice he had initially doubted, and eventually felt the call to take ...”

“... big stuff – the national plan, the new approach, to expand or die’. Industrial production rose by 11 per cent in the year after the pliable Heathcoat Amory’s 1959 election budget – a completely unsustainable gallop. Macmillan’s obsession with expansion and his utter neglect of inflation were of course a reaction to the bitter experience of the ...”

“... gay sex, out of sight of the law. The association with licence has never quite gone away. In 1963, Mark Birley insisted that his new club, Annabel’s, ‘must smell of exclusivity and sex’. Paula Yates posed naked in the saloon of the Reform Club.The 18th-century business model was to fleece rich young men by overcharging for food and drink. The idea of the ...”

“... the Spectator did not hope for better than ‘tenuous’ relations with any government. My spirits rose when I heard this story. They have been rising ever since. Whatever the Lawson-Wilson mode may be called, there is nothing fogeyish about it. By way of contrast, the pseudo-chivalrous defences of grand people’s privacy rights – the Queen Mum, the man ...”

“... Government, who had contracted the project to Boeing, eventually cancelled the SST as its costs rose, and with most countries still refusing to allow supersonic passenger flights over their territory, the Boeing 747 remains in 1993 the fastest and most cost-effective long-haul airliner. Pan-Am, meanwhile, went bust in 1991 – not least, Irving ...”

“... Laughland, Ponting’s lawyer. By not doing this, Michael Heseltine has earned himself a black mark in important Conservative circles, where, when it comes to the leadership stakes, it will be taken into account that he did not behave as an officer and a gentleman should by going along to the Old Bailey to face the music. This is a view I have heard from ...”