“... plan and the extraordinary Calcutta Journal, edited in those years by the radical English wanderer James Silk Buckingham and his friend Rammohan Roy, a high-caste Bengali intellectual who campaigned to reform Hinduism and attacked the ruling East India Company. Both men believed in the reforming power of written constitutions for India and republished the Plan ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”

“... say “A friend of mine just died” doesn’t mean anything any more,’ the historian Simon Watney said in 1994, but that network is qualitatively and quantitively specific to how gay men live. Deaths in those networks mean deaths of whole areas of memory and association. Death for most heterosexuals means family deaths most of the time, up to the ...”

“... a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The finding of death by misadventure in Peach’s case made any prosecution impossible, despite there being a strong argument for a second inquest. The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough ...”

“... of the countryside); it had now become hard to tell the difference between them and devils. King James in his Demonology (1597) is indignant at the idea of devils who live in the storm-clouds: probably he felt that this practically lets you get back to believing in the pagan demigods. The familiar of Faust in the original German has never been to Hell at ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... ethos and scene. Technically speaking, the panoramic method of War and Peace, which made Henry James refer to it as a ‘loose baggy monster’, is far more cunningly ordered than it looks. No one is dropped or forgotten; scene dovetails neatly into scene; above all, the central event – the attempted seduction of Natasha by Anatoly Kuragin – works by ...”

“... well known. Dylan is among the (male) English (language) poets here: the translators of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Hardy, Kipling, Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Berryman, Stevens, Frost – all figure prominently. Much of what Ricks has to say on this ...”

“... Last summer, the National Theatre put on Timon of Athens as a play about the credit crunch. Simon Russell Beale was the glossy, well-fed protagonist, a wealthy patron of the arts and liberal dispenser of gifts, who plunges into misanthropy when he can borrow no more and his friends reject him. The production was stylishly contemporary, set in the expensive interiors of Mayfair and Canary Wharf ...”

“... of The Prince was ‘shrewd’ if ‘immoral’. In Britain, the influential 1602 translation by Simon Patrick of Innocent Gentillet’s treatise Anti-Machiavel managed to disseminate Machiavelli’s ideas, sometimes in garbled form, as it rebutted them. Gentillet notes with satisfaction that although he doesn’t know if the Medici (to one of ...”

“... is a list in the Sun of ‘100 Britons we love to hate’, which places him in the company of James Hewitt, Jonathan Aitken and Simon Cowell. On a number of occasions, she connects Joyce’s case with that of Roger Casement, another Irishman hanged for treason in Britain during a world war. The comparison is, to put it ...”

“... to be recommended some work on American politics, but Brogan always suggested the memoirs of Saint-Simon. Roosevelt ran a court, and the danger of a court is that the ego of the monarch will be inflated by the adulation of those who surround him. More recently, the White House has become a thieves’ kitchen of intrigue and faction. It was not simply that ...”

“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... in their judgment of modern architecture – compared with such contemporaries as Alice Coleman, Simon Jenkins or Charles Windsor they are positively nuanced, and they wrote presciently of the social and architectural success of Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower in the early 1980s – their book also reflects a view that ‘almost everyone believed in and ...”