“... became known as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions ...”

“... it seeks to include within one set of covers everything that any serious reader of Waugh might hope to find ... everything notably funny, elegant, beautiful, profound or self-revealing, and everything that seems to define Waugh’s own aims.’ The ‘overproduction’ could in the nature of the case not be stopped, at this time of day, even by the least ...”

“... July. In the evening go across the road to the newly empty No 55 for a kind of book fair. Francis Hope died in the Paris air-crash in 1974; pressed for space, his widow Mary Hope is now, 22 years later, disposing of his books and has asked some of his friends round for a glass of wine and to take away whatever they might ...”

“... The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is … the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.’ Who among our contemporary playwrights would dare pen anything so shamelessly romantic? Who would even want to? Certainly not our Brenton-and-Hare political puritans, nor yet our Ayckbourn-and-Frayn tragicomedians ...”

“... a combination of propitious circumstances has brought forth two world-beating runners. Nobody can hope to account for this, but the luck is worth glorying in. It embraces even the principals’ names: Coe and Ovett – as snappy as trademarks, and eminently saleable on the vowel-happy continent of Europe where the pair’s records have mostly been set. One ...”

“... New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2019) both feature in Harris’s bibliography. But since ...”

“... architectural theory and made Dyer into a kind of rebel against the Enlightenment. He encounters Christopher Wren in the role of a devotee of Gresham’s College empiricism, and then takes part in a dialogue (appropriately, in a Restoration comedy mode) with John Vanbrugh, cast as inquisitive modern in contrast with Dyer’s suspicious loyalties to the ...”

“... over notes I made in the 1980s during my investigation into the Birmingham pub bombings, in the hope that these will help them to track down one of the two surviving bombers. A bit late, you may think, given that the bombings took place nearly fifty years ago, and my investigation, which led to the release of six innocent men, was concluded in 1991. What ...”

“... concern, though constant interruption and his own shameful lack of preparation meant there was no hope of his doing it properly. Not a dream that needs long on the couch to crack, but Spender analysed one element with particular insight: he was currently struggling with a long memorial poem in which he hoped to sum up what he thought about Auden, ‘of which ...”

“... Christopher Harper-Mercer​ wrote that he had no life. He had no girlfriend and no job; the world was against him. He lived with his mother only a few miles from the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Oregon, and he collected guns. He shot nine people dead at the college on 1 October and injured nine others before killing himself ...”

“... the physiological draw at its most capricious. Yet we pay attention to how others have died in the hope of something better or for assurance that, since others have managed, so will we. Last words and behaviour seem irresistibly exemplary and consequential, a testimony to the truth or falseness of what we believe or live by. Dying – and last moments in ...”

“... board under Perry Anderson. While their elders on the left – the generation of E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill – had planted radical politics in the soil of English history, the new cohort had more cosmopolitan ambitions. They looked abroad, especially to the Continent and the likes of Lukács, Gramsci and Althusser, for remedies against what they saw ...”

“... forms of criticism. Among the most deep and distinguished of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of ...”

“... restless compatriots with a coherent ideology and politics of anticolonial nationalism. In Christopher de Bellaigue’s politically astute biography, Mossadegh is not the ‘dizzy old wizard’ and ‘tantrum-throwing Scheherazade’ of countless Anglo-American memoirs and press reports, but a member of ‘that generation of Western-educated Asians who ...”

“... relevant.) Among those who attempted horizontal investigations of the Muggletonians was, notably, Christopher Hill, who found significant links between these people and John Milton, as they drank and argued in the London pubs of the 1650s. For Hill and Thompson these were ‘radicals’, political as well as religious activists, part of Hill’s World Turned ...”