“... For a female handler at the top of her game, there can only be a glittery skirt suit from St John, a brand long associated with financially secure American grandmothers, which now does a roaring second-hand trade on Facebook through groups called ‘St John Dog Show Outfits’ and ‘St ...”

“... the late 1500s that it began to be theorised in terms of gender. Feminine rhyme was ‘sweeter’, John Harington wrote in 1591, in the preface to his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. It could also be comic, as Christopher Marlowe realised when writing his Hero and Leander two years later – a poem which, in describing the beauty of Leander’s ...”

“... long time, and might have treated it more decently – as he does elsewhere in the novel. In 1964 John Fowles published ‘a self-portrait in ideas’ called The Aristos, of which he has said: ‘I hate to think of the awful pages of bad philosophy that would be in my novels if I hadn’t written that. ‘Perhaps time will find a similar use for Mantissa: at ...”

“... If Robespierre could have read the second volume of John Ehrman’s massive biography of Pitt it would have saved him a good deal of worry. The two men had more in common than might appear at first sight, or than either of them would have cared to admit. Each was a decidedly cold fish, a bachelor of that alarming species that lives only for politics ...”

“... government. And in the best essay in the volume – full of substance yet light in manner – John McKenna attacks Elton in the nicest possible way from the other end, by showing how the principal features of the ‘revolutionised’ 16th-century state – nationalism, the imperial crown and reform – were all present in 15th-century England and arguably ...”

“... to the gateway with its heraldic bull’s head, so discouraging to the female students. Dudley St John Magnus also lives in Canada, but he was born in Surrey and claims to have lived as a bagman in Australia in the Thirties. The narrator of his semi-autobiographical novel, Hanabeke, is called Morton Montgomery de Ruthwell (a name as unsuitable for an ...”

“... ceremony, but the culmination of weeks or months of courtship, gift-giving and negotiation. John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk ...”

“... intangible feminine principle. True, a similar principle was being evoked in the early Thirties by John Cowper Powys, when he commended Dorothy Richardson for having dredged up her novels ‘out of the abyss of feminine consciousness’; and there’s Virginia Woolf’s famous comment on the same set of novels, when she noted their author’s mastery over what ...”

“... she finds Mrs Taylor taking photographs of snails copulating, and Alan Taylor – who since John Betjeman’s death has styled himself ‘the nation’s Parkinsonist’ – lying on the floor recovering from delirium. The diarist comments: ‘Cynthia just did not know what to say: snail sexuality in the garden, delirious dreams – and from outside, the ...”

“... most of whom she quickly established a remarkably lively and gossipy relationship. Diana Athill, John Guest, Terence Kilmartin, and many others, were recipients of chat, grumbles, doubts, jokes, questions, japes – often with cross-references to each other: if one editor disapproved of a new poem, she told you, and shot it in your direction, thus giving you ...”

“... of a displaced society in which few of the traditional myths – Red Clydeside on one hand and John Buchanite Tory collectivism on the other – have still got any clout. Piecing together a history in which one has been involved, one tends to isolate symbols or epiphanies which offer metaphors of change: Yeats’s ‘monstrous familiar images’. Another ...”

“... as Heseltine’s eyes and ears. Nor were they rewarded for their work. When he was invited into John Major’s government, after gracefully conceding defeat in the second leadership ballot, Heseltine should have made ministerial jobs for Mates and Hampson absolute conditions of his return. He should have done the same even if privately he thought them ...”

“... and fiancée. Büchner, it seems, packed a lifetime of intense experience into very few years. John Reddick’s view of Büchner is the polar opposite of that taken by Georg Lukács. In an essay written in Moscow in 1937, ‘The Real Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation’, Lukács announced that Büchner’s ‘basic trait was a burning ...”

“... of them was that the Church bought out its partners at an early stage and at a generous price. Sir John Hall, the Newcastle entrepreneur, was bought out of the Gateshead Metro shopping centre before it was built. He got £40m, but the Church kept losing money on the project until it was finally sold at a staggering loss in 1990. Sir ...”

“... Yalden, Hammond, Stepney, Fenton (Elijah) and Hughes (John): where are you now? Ten of the 52 poets represented in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets fail to make an appearance in the Oxford Companion to English Literature. On its own, of course, this doesn’t prove a thing. At the same time I would guess that these poets are known about today – if they are known about today – simply because they were once biographised by Dr Johnson ...”