“... Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come. (So English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed ...”

“... and shows the government, the prime minister and the political elite generally in about as bad a light as possible. It was probably inevitable that the Home Office would eventually undo so many ambitions. Its structure is ‘dysfunctional’, as everyone has noted, and as a department it is almost impossible to organise effectively. But that is not its main ...”

“... professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier. The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its ...”

“... American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an ...”

“... the war (that included many Englishmen at the time, let alone now), heard about the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Lady with the Lamp tending wounded soldiers at Scutari. A belief has persisted that the war was more than usually senseless and inconsequential, but Figes rejects this, seeing it as a turning point in the history of Europe, of Russia and of ...”

“... ask Buchanan for his endorsement, which he grudgingly gave, though to no avail.As the leading light of American libertarianism since the 1970s, and the founder of the Cato Institute, Murray Rothbard is better known than Francis. Born in 1926, he began his complicated political evolution as a right-wing activist after the Second World War, and spent his ...”

“... at outrageous human cost to both black and white. In a superb chapter, ‘Towards Australia’, Alan Frost argues that the Aborigines were dispossessed, the convicts exiled and exploited, so that Britain might have a far-south strategic base which could also serve as an off-shore gaol, conveniently remote. Whatever fine words were spoken at the initial ...”

“... some of his other music of that time, and the drastic new dating (mainly the result of research by Alan Tyson) is likely to come as a surprise to many readers of this book. Another – and much better known – work on which Landon throws fresh chronological light is the last piano concerto, K.595. Mozart entered it in his ...”

“... it as one of the few contemporary novels he liked. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Friedman, the author of a forgotten novel called Hermaphrodeity, who described it as ‘a nearly inscrutable mystery’ powered by ‘camp, vamp and very damp wit’. He praised White’s ‘poetic brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but ...”

“... wrote in the Independent that the Labour Party has moved ‘to the left faster than the speed of light’. The definition of ‘left’ here is one that few outside Blairite circles would recognise, but it’s still telling. The idea that Labour has fled to the ‘left’, though absurd by any conventional definition, and the belief in the party’s general ...”

“... written with Clarke’s usual panache. The Russian chapters are fascinating – if only for the light they throw on Stalin’s Soviet Union and the futility of the notion that Left understands Left. The problem lies in the weight given to them. Can it be justified by the novelty of the sources and the fact that other historians have tended to neglect ...”

“... voyage and uttering Enlightenment cries in Romantic language. ‘Oh, bliss, to be young in the light of morning over the sea! To awaken refreshed, young and strong, every sense on the alert! Malte Moritz! My name, hovering like a kite in liberty’s breezes. Malte Moritz von Putbus. To my friends, though, I am often “Mignon”.’ He is sailing to the ...”

“... and the self-mocking undertone of many of the most brilliant metaphors make Barnes more like Alan Bennett than he is like Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. Indeed, on page 71 of England, England the following serio-ludicro simile suddenly unfurls: It’s like looking for the tag to unwrap a CD. You know that feeling? There’s a coloured strip running all the ...”

“... operating). As Leslie Stephen, first editor, once said, much of the value of the DNB lies in the light it sheds on the lives of the second-rate, meaning second-rank, about whom it is not easy to find information elsewhere. If we do not need it for Lord Blake’s long piece on Harold Macmillan, we certainly need it for the life of a lesser prime ...”

“... and refraction which makes it easy for us to grasp the relation between objects and rays of light, retinal images, photographs and even draughtsmen’s versions of what is seen, was no longer relevant. In all sorts of situations the expression ‘I see’ – the end of the argument when photographic evidence is produced – must be replaced by ‘tell ...”