“... took him from the ranks of the Parliamentary opposition in the 1620S through high office under Charles I to execution on Tower Hill. With the help of archival papers scattered between Sheffield, Dublin and California, the contributors are able to build up a new picture not just of the Earl of Strafford but, through him, of an entire period. At the other ...”

“... not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are meant to do: extend the terrain as they go over it. These books are also ...”

“... the poem as a ballade, a form much practised by that good friend of the Princess of Aquitaine’s, Charles d’Orléans. Much of Muldoon’s recent writing has been elaborately, even obsessively codified in this way, as in the rhyme schemes of ‘Yarrow’ and the sonnet sequence ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ that concludes Hay. In his combination of ...”

“... in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research:   I shall be honoured, Mr Dickens.   Charles, if you please. We like friends to be friends. The Holmes series has attracted even more continuations than Edwin Drood – among them Stashower’s own attempt, The Adventures of the Ectoplasmic Man (1985), a historical whodunnit that imagines Houdini ...”

“... conviction about his own high moral purpose. All this adds up to his being, in the phrase of Charles Moore, ‘the most pointlessly combative person in human history’. At one point someone at the Downing Street switchboard, ‘at the end of a not untypical day’, makes the mistake of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both ...”

“... broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around ...”

“... even into those who served on it. He got off to a good start with books by Claudel, Gide, Roger Martin du Gard and Stéphane Mallarmé, bound in the same white jackets as the NRF. He blundered in 1913 by passing over the first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, but by 1918 he had persuaded Proust to entrust him with all his future work. Being ...”

“... for the Society was not born with any sense of mission against the Reformation. Like Martin Luther, Loyola wished to transform and inspire the Latin Western Church, but their conversion experiences took them on opposite trajectories, respectively rebellion and obedience (of a sort). We should also dispense with the common idea that Loyola was a ...”

“... wholly different life-style and sensibility. A much more old-fashioned stylisation is achieved by Charles Johnston, who writes with verve and elegance in many forms. Expressing admiration for Lowell’s Life Studies, he produces his own version about his own past, his schooldays and episodes from his time en poste abroad, combining these in a little volume ...”

“... lasting damage.In 1972, just before his seventieth birthday, after finishing Maigret and Monsieur Charles and without premeditation, Simenon stopped writing fiction. As with the other big decisions in his life, moving house or indeed moving country, he didn’t overthink it. He just knew that he was done. After that came the fifth phase, in which he dictated ...”

“... story opens, half the planet has already been wiped out? Or the terminally desolate landscapes of Martin Amis’s fictions, where social and environmental decline reciprocate one another’s effects? One quite well-developed genre or sub-genre of travel writing in which Mark Hudson’s book could plausibly be placed would be the journey through ruins, the ...”

“... was apparently not a matter of high spiritual drama: his instructor, the celebrity Jesuit Martin D’Arcy, was struck by how very ‘matter of fact’ Waugh’s approach was. For someone who missed ‘the restraint of a traditional culture’, the unmitigated authority of the universal Church naturally had a salutary appeal. Part of Waugh’s religion ...”

“... and published in November 1985, which is the most objective and well-documented account; also on Martin Walker’s book With Extreme Prejudice,* which provides considerably more, and more recent, information on the harassment, as well as a more radical political evaluation of the events. The long-promised report of the Avon and Somerset team, amounting to ...”

“... at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The president had been thinking about what would happen after the war since 1862, when his generals began to seize swathes of Confederate territory, but had stubbornly resisted the idea that emancipated slaves would have to be given the vote ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”