“... versions were hawked in vain round the University Presses of North America: it was left to Michael Schmidt and Peter Jones of the relatively unfunded Carcanet Press to recognise the moral and cultural responsibility. In fact, I find my sympathy goes out to Drummond very easily indeed. I must declare an interest, for ...”

“... regiment or publisher, or who (having slavered with the best of them over the early flowering of Jones minor) is now a sleek and rotund editor of something like the Times or the Spectator. Peregrine Worsthorne, in this rather idle but charming book,* strives to come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling ...”

“... trained in his London studio, including William Marlow, Joseph Farington and, best of all, Thomas Jones and William Hodges. Unlike Gainsborough, who took off from the tradition of Dutch landscape painting, in Rome Wilson became a follower of the school of Claude Lorrain, more classically Arcadian in its subjects and atmosphere, more expansive in its ...”

“... for his rudeness, but partly because he captured the essence of my other, still breathing hero, Michael Jordan. ‘Half dust, half deity’, Byron wrote of man’s estate, but I applied his meaning more specifically. ‘Alike unfit to sink or soar’ seemed to describe that hanging space, a few feet off the ground, in which Jordan lived. Jordan has presided ...”

“... and disdainful Ganguly, particularly loathsome, whereas one gets the feeling that they reckon Michael Vaughan to be a thoroughly decent bloke – more or less one of their own. Cricket has undoubtedly gained hugely from the friendly rivalry of this Ashes series, particularly by way of comparison with other sports, above all football, which seems a ...”

“... alone for more than four decades. ‘He seduced the army with bonuses,’ according to Tacitus (in Michael Grant’s translation of the Annals), ‘and his cheap food policy was successful bait for civilians … War or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit. Upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed.’ Suetonius puts ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away. The loss of 880,000 men meant that many women would never marry, but they would have the vote and they would have unprecedented ...”

“... the help of a book like Gareth Peter’s My Daddies!, Mel Elliot’s The Girl with Two Dads or Michael Joosten’s My Two Dads and Me – never mind that they’re intended for a younger age group. Time to consolidate their sense of themselves. Instead he reads to them about the early life of the Buddha. Better that they should learn detachment than be ...”

“... defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first ...”

“... the subject is generally a grey one some of the characters – Brown, Castle, Wilson, Woodcock, Jones – had colour and some of the events contained high drama. The book does not quite do justice to the sense of desperate exasperation which overcame everyone I know – including Sir Denis – who was obliged during those years to grapple with the ‘union ...”

“... be uncomplicated, drawing as they did on the Marxist scenario of class struggle – Gareth Stedman Jones’s classic Outcast London (1971) was significantly subtitled ‘A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society’. Traditional labour history had no doubts who the heroes and the villains were. Things are no longer so ...”

“... of inspiring an afterlife that has come to include Glastonbury, ley-lines, Monty Python, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and a thriving industry of occult bookshops. It was Chrétien who first realised that the legendary history of Arthur, largely invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth a few decades earlier, allowed huge scope for making up adventures for his ...”

“... range’ of the party’s new parliamentary candidates, he began to tell me about Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones. I hadn’t heard of him. ‘You should meet him,’ the MP said. A press officer cut in. ‘He’s a Devon farmer, who set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to ...”

“... watched and visitors to Lee’s dying father were cast as Bevanite conspirators) and told Mervyn Jones, who worked for Tribune: ‘Nye is 60. He can’t go on resigning and walking out and isolating himself with his little band of faithful. He can’t go on like that, he can’t.’ CND, which Lee thought ‘a hysterical middle-class lobby’, now dominated ...”