“... schools. In their collection of essays on 12th-century Latin, The Tongue of the Fathers (1998), David Townsend and Andrew Taylor confirmed Ong’s insight. Latin discourse, they wrote, ‘endlessly replicates tradition. It upholds a monological and orthodox consensus … To enter into this language is, par excellence, to enter into patriarchy. Medieval ...”

“... opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since The Child ...”

“... I made another personal discovery: Stuart’s mother was descended, through her mother, from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP who owned a plantation in Portland. Further questions arose. What, beyond simple economic interest, turned people into active pro-slavers? What were they afraid of? How did they hope to stem the tide of abolitionism? How should ...”

“... that politics sometimes enters into politics. He says he was reluctant to nationalise Northern Rock because it would have meant a very bad deal for the British taxpayer. He doesn’t admit that he was terrified of anything that might look like a reversion to the bad old days of socialism. When he agreed before the 2010 election to take part in the ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... of the New World, re-creates Mehta’s years at the Arkansas School of the Blind in Little Rock, which he attended from 1949 to 1952. If Vedi is the most closely focused and harrowing of the books in the series, Sound-Shadows is in many ways the most haunting, because it shows us most clearly how the author learned to manage both the fact and the idea ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... and programmatic engagement with the ‘elemental’ – sea-voyages and disasters, islands, rock, marine biology. I wonder, too, if one critic’s ‘appeased self-knowledge’ might not be another’s ‘complacency’. In The Price of Stone (1985), for instance, given in its entirety in New Selected Poems, Murphy has several poems about the building ...”

“... there is nothing to catch anyone on the raw in the questions. They are soft and sugary. They will rock no boats and call forth no hard answers. And yet, despite this softness at its core, the novel exerts such poetic power and such pleasures of form and such potency in the final dawn scene at Curlow Creek – where all the ambiguities are left floating in ...”

“... culture to which he belongs and of the morality which enables him to sit in judgment on the very rock out of which he was hewn. He appears, however, to have missed the further irony that, by ascribing to Israel the creative power which invented their God and so became responsible for initiating the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... South-West (Death comes for the Archbishop), turn-of-the-17th-century Quebec (Shadows on the Rock), antebellum Virginia (Sapphira and the Slave Girl) and an unfinished novel about Avignon in the 14th century. For her the past came closer to genuine goodness, nobility and the virtues of stability, innocence and grace. The present she saw as ...”

“... or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the contemporary pieces, Drag has fascinating material on early English ...”

“... more manacled by the observances of etiquette.’ On less grand occasions they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part ...”