“... Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The White Company. As Adrian and Michael Cox’s Oxford Book of Historical Stories may confirm in due course, I suspect that there has been a continuous tradition from the great Victorians right through to Patrick O’Brian ...”

“... are appointed.Starmer has given jobs to several well-known individuals from outside Parliament. Patrick Vallance, the new minister for science, appeared regularly on the televised coronavirus updates. Jacqui Smith, the new minister for higher education, became the first female home secretary in 2007, but has not been a member of Parliament since 2010. James ...”

“... at birth with some presentiment of loss.We catch another glimpse of Quintana, aged three, in The White Album, this time at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, ‘blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei’. Didion reports that Quintana wanted to go to the beach. ‘She cannot go to the beach,’ she writes, ‘because there has been an ...”

“... the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with life’ which allowed African Americans to navigate a white world not of their making, a world that did not recognise their gods, their manners, their mores or their humanity. ‘I happen to think that the content of my mother’s life,’ Wilson said, ‘her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of ...”

“... found its fulfilment in the presidency of Jack, but originated in the mind of his father. Joseph Patrick Kennedy was born in the Irish enclave of East Boston in 1888, the first child of Mary Augusta Hickey, the daughter of a successful builder, and Patrick Joseph Kennedy, a Democratic party official with a series of ...”

“... any other standard of right and wrong that made him more than a match for opponents like Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the judiciary committee in 2007-8, or Jay Rockefeller, the head of the intelligence committee in those years. Leahy and Rockefeller had their chance to subject him to investigation when the Democrats became the majority party in ...”

“... he’d slept with the wife of one of his professors. He was also an acolyte of the sociologist Patrick Geddes, who had just published The Evolution of Sex, which served as an ‘ethical endorsement of desire’ and defended the use of contraception. Daniell, whom Rowbotham variously describes as brilliant, imperious and quivering with ‘excessive ...”

“... for postage stamps. Here, again, impeccably jacketed in black with red swastika’d armband on white ground, is Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich: The Definitive Account of Nazi Germany by Hitler’s Armaments Minister. After a few minutes spent considering this Berlin Wall of travellers’ dulce et utile, one would hardly be surprised to find a ...”

“... much more unstable and challenging model – Shakespeare. The process is fairly familiar, but R.S. White, the author of two excellent books on Shakespearean romance and tragedy, has examined it in detail and come up with a host of fresh examples and insights. His book makes a good complement to John Barnard’s more general but also innovative study in the new ...”

“... hills of indigo and malachite glass, veined in their transparencies with braids of opaque white water, their spumy crests running level with the ship’s cross-trees’. His picture of the virgin continent, in two early chapters, has the same graphic quality. In 1784 Parliament passed a Transportation Act for the benefit of criminals under ...”

“... by Tony Adams (Arsenal centre-back, 1983-2002); and, now, Arsène Wenger’s My Life in Red and White. Arsène Wenger on the touchline at the Emirates Stadium, 29 March 2014. The Premier League has come a long way since it started nearly thirty years ago. Revenues for the 2018-19 season were more than £5 billion. It’s the most watched sports league ...”

“... any remaining dun-coloured realism to a few pockets.’ ‘Dun-coloured realism’ derives from Patrick White’s contemptuous description of the local literary scene as he found it on his return from Europe in 1948. White – the only antipodean to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on ...”

“... Maugham said that Kipling was ‘not quite a gent’. When Kipling said of somebody, ‘He’s a white man,’ Maugham thought: ‘How I wish, in order to fulfil my preconceptions of him, he would say he was a pukka sahib. “He’s a pukka sahib, all right,” continued Kipling.’ So that rules him out. But Willie’s observations lose authority when one ...”

“... when Bloom reads the Evening Telegraph and finds a mention of the funeral of ‘the late Mr Patrick Dignam’ that he himself has attended, we get this dry annotation: ‘The 16 June 1904 Evening Telegraph did not report on any of that day’s funerals, even fictitious ones such as Dignam’s.’ In Circe, Joyce uses the word ‘Elephantuliasis’; it ...”

“... have been, or just possibly was, eighty in 2014. The second child and eldest son of George Charles Patrick (‘Pat’) Bingham, the sixth earl, and his wife, Kaitlin, much was made in 1974 of his ancestry, in particular the life and character of his great-great-grandfather, the third earl. In addition to treating his Irish tenants at the time of the Famine ...”