“... a year as Literary Editor for the Nation, doing so well at matching books and reviewers that John Crowe Ransom said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize for it. ‘Not since Poe had an American poet laid down the law in quite such a carnival spirit.’ In those days of talented amateurs the Eng Lit business was still the Gay Science. Used by Nietzsche, and as a ...”

“... First, it falls silent on 9 October 1956. Thus it excludes many – indeed most – of the major and traumatic events of the Gaitskell Leadership: the uneasy partnership with Aneurin Bevan as Deputy Leader; the 1959 General Election defeat and the subsequent struggle over the philosophy of the party; the Clause Four row of 1959-60; the first flowering ...”

“... that Rab was still an appeaser. Dr Cosgrave points out that on this occasion ‘as in every major crisis when he disagreed’, he ‘made no serious public protest’. Macmillan waited and Butler was recruited to take charge, but while it was clear that there were many people on the backbenches who would oppose Butler were he to stand for prime ...”

“... might be a mistake. Just as 12 years for Ken would be too much, Boris is surely unthinkable in a major public office with real executive power. The alternative would be for all progressive voters to switch their first-preference vote to the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. In mayoral elections to date the Lib Dems have done by far the best among ...”

“... mode, is that it works. It reveals hitherto unidentified meanings and ways of having meaning in major literary texts.’ The defence raises as many questions as it settles. Any number of critical modes ‘work’ in the sense of generating new and exotic meanings. But are those meanings worth generating? And what does Miller mean by ‘...”

“... obvious things in common: each had many marriages (four for Bend’Or, five for Getty); each was a major public figure in his country; each was accused of favouring Hitler and the Nazis during the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or ...”

“... as a result of pressure from local law firms, some with strong political connections, and from the major City of London banks which had begun migrating offshore in greater numbers after Labour took power in 1964. Noticing that the Cayman Islands had successfully turned themselves into a tax haven, the States of Jersey decided to create a regulatory and ...”

“... Other Shore’, and this is the stage on which his two protagonists, David Livingstone and John Kirk, play out their very different and not always complementary roles in the abolition of slavery. Liebowitz, a professor emeritus of medicine, writes with the enthusiasm of an accomplished academic who has found a new field of research after a career spent ...”

“... of notes, it does not reach the point around 1700 when Richard Bentley reshaped the Press into a major player, as he tried to reshape Horace, Paradise Lost and Trinity College, where McKitterick is fellow and librarian. In the 1710s the appearance of Bentley’s Horace and Newton’s Principia on CUP’s list gave it extraordinary distinction. In the period ...”

“... Garlake remarks, ‘designed less to inspire than to avoid giving offence’. Despite this, the major exhibitions which the Arts Council mounted at the Tate Gallery during the immediate postwar years greatly enlivened its near-moribund exhibition programme and aided London’s gradual takeover from Paris as a centre for the international art ...”

“... empire became even more influential on Elizabethan strategic thinking. According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... preface to this celebratory volume of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner on her 70th birthday, John Carey apologises for the fact that the topics discussed are restricted to 16th and 17th-century English literature. Dame Helen’s latest book, after all, was The Composition of ‘The Four Quartets’. Eliot’s presence, though, still hovers over ...”