“... the Labour Party do their work for them.’ This analysis led him to a startling prediction. On 11 May 1975, he wrote: ‘A coalition has been born without being formally declared: it is broadly the Tories and Liberals throwing their weight behind Callaghan, I think. They won’t touch Wilson. They’ll get rid of him just as they got rid of Heath ... I ...”

“... and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the Anglican clergyman Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to ...”

“... disease was driven to some more dangerous site, and that it eventually caused his death. The trick may have consisted in ‘putting his feet in cold water’, as reported by Mrs Thrale: a not unreasonable expedient, though unlikely to achieve much in the way of cure. The other mystery derives primarily from Johnson’s letter to Mrs Thrale of 1773, written in ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... sold by the hundreds of thousand: today they seem naive, and sometimes comically romantic, and may well be virtually out of print. Marie Stopes had to face unremitting, often crude attacks. After the war we met regularly to discuss her sales, usually in some dark little-frequented restaurant where her persecutors would not track her down. I was incredulous ...”

“... there are now departments with no very junior people and no professors. The government may have set out to hack the ‘dead wood’ from the university system: what they have done instead is to slice off the living shoots and healthy branches. This was, of course, entirely predictable: established scholars will go where they are most valued and ...”

“... small attacks, but the local population was, Ludewig suggests, mostly quiet – an attitude that may well have been prompted by the massacre of villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane by Waffen-SS soldiers a few weeks before. Model, on the other hand, had to watch German forces squeeze along the few remaining roads near Falaise, abandoning most of their equipment ...”

“... that’s no bad thing: her blend of crackling violence and surreal wit often seems closer to David Lynch than Aquinas.The theological approach receives a predictably complete expression in Christine Flanagan’s edition of The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The two women were introduced by Robert Lowell, who had met O’Connor at ...”

“... with diagrams of blocks needed for an architectural project. Others were on pieces of paper which may have been preserved because they also contained notes, fragments of poems or drafts of letters, for example. Such drawings can be seen in New York, together with an outstanding selection of the small group of highly finished sheets that he made as gifts for a ...”

“... he was a child (we are told), but had scant interest in what he might do with it should he get it. David Cameron explained that he wanted to be prime minister ‘because I think I’d be good at it’, but this is something Johnson has never maintained about himself. The evidence to the contrary is already accumulating rapidly. And yet, there he ...”

“... earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying:Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come ...”

“... Public Industries, where Redwood and Hatch, while accepting that the concept of the PSBR may function as a crude check on official profligacy in an imperfect world, go so far as to admit that in an ideal world ‘the PSBR, as currently defined, is a theoretical nonsense.’) In any event, the future magnitude of an entity that can be neither ...”

“... critic, but brought to life by him as skilfully as is the even more unpromising Leviticus by David Damrosch. Damrosch begins: ‘Perhaps the greatest problem facing students of the Bible as literature is the fact that so much of the Bible is not literature at all’ – a thought which will occur to most of the few readers Leviticus possesses, and which ...”

“... for ‘an overemphasis on the oral component ... and a comparative neglect of the history’. He may have in mind here the formal origins of oral history in the US, where the life-stories of significant citizens were collected in a Columbia University project from the Forties onwards. For Evans, these public figures did not embody ‘the mythical and ...”

“... protocols and internal military guidelines give much latitude to commanders on the ground. This may make the law appear feeble, sometimes to the point of vacuity, but it is also its realism. Chief among the paradoxes of the law of war is that it cannot be enforced. The moral opprobrium that has surrounded the use of poison gas is an exception that proves ...”