“... Weale makes an oblique reference to the broadcast of 24 September 1940, but it deserves a more central place in the history of treason. As the Nazis realised, the new communications technology worked in their favour by obliterating national boundaries and blending regional populations into mass audiences. The Workers’ Challenge station was just one ...”

“... moment – has removed a broken seat. I pick up a copy of the Gazette later on, and see there is more. A £300 Amaco mountain bike (‘with 21 gears, coloured purple and black’) was stolen from a garage at Clingre Farm, Stinchcombe last Saturday. The theft is mentioned on page two and again on page four. This is surely how it should be. West Country ...”

“... intersect; at several points, the arguments are similar. The reasons why one book is so much more productive than the other are mattters of writing, of the self-inscription of each writer in her work, of the legible understandings of the task in hand. One book exists because a highly-regarded writer has visited the domain of a destructive epidemic ...”

“... from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is ...”

“... The seam of her damaged mouth has cultured pearls and ore, veins of copper and gold more valuable, for the poet, than the metals laboriously won from the worked-out mines among which the two children live and play. Although speechless, Pearl is desperate to speak, read and write, praying for St Elmo’s fire up here on the ...”

“... I die?’ Phoned by the Standard, I say the poem’s a dud and the London market’s that bit more bearish. Guiltily, when La Stampa calls, I become altogether a bull. The situation is absurd, like the trade in Westland shares, but as real as that delusion, and another awkward reminder of the values we’ve elected to live by. Fortunately, I’m not the ...”

“... But presumably that is another desired effect in this uneasy novel. As used to be said of Thomas Hardy, Wilson turns his screw of misery once too often. The end of the novel has Giles alone: a Milton, Oedipus or Lear without even a daughter by his side (and Tibba’s devirgination is anyway imminent). Miss Agar has been turned away. The great edition ...”

“... proves that the humour is not ephemeral,’ Arnold Haskell wrote in the Fifties. But today, more than 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred ...”

“... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...”

“... a foxhunting man, he was the least bookish of the leading founders, many of whom were much more deeply immersed in the classics. The selfless Cincinnatus, the reforming Solon, Cicero in his defence of the republican constitution – these were the cynosures of virtuous conduct for the founding generation. Over two centuries later, today’s Americans ...”

“... for weeks. A video of the shooting was also posted on YouTube, where it has been streamed more than a million times. Many concluded after watching the video that the shooting wasn’t a murder, but an execution. Six days after the shooting, a peaceful march in downtown Oakland turned violent. Protesters who had gathered to express their outrage at ...”

“... four flats and three garages in Canterbury, two properties in the nearby village of Charing, two more in South-East London and a holiday home in North Wales, where Nowell and their two daughters had taken refuge during the war. He also possessed a nicely spread portfolio, which included holdings not only in Johnson’s Wire Works but in Lonrho, not yet ...”

“... Casual’, who was in reality the journalist James Greenwood, then went home for a second, more restorative, hot bath. On 12 January, the first of three articles detailing his experience appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title ‘A Night in a Workhouse’. Seth Koven opens his rich and absorbing study of Victorian ...”

“... Beaufoy, later a militia colonel and distinguished astronomer, admitted to wearing little more than the equivalent of a pair of pyjamas. The wars with Revolutionary France discouraged Alpinism, but by Byron’s day the flow of English visitors, whether climbers or sightseers, was in his view insupportable; they were fit company for the Swiss, ‘a ...”

“... It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a shaky living by wandering the country and producing portraits on demand. His outspoken wife, Hannah, formerly a lady’s maid, was the real hub of the family. She was determined to educate her sons ...”