“... assumption that, whenever a town fell into Allied hands, it was his right to commandeer its best hotel. Since he worked very much in concert with his two principal competitors – Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and Christopher Buckley of the Daily Telegraph – this was something they normally achieved, although at times they went one better by ...”

“... institution in the so-called École de Yale. In 1979, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, all at the time Yale colleagues, put together a kind of manifesto entitled Deconstruction and Criticism. There were certain affinities among the five but the differences were more striking. On one side, Derrida, as ...”

“... an anthology of poems edited by a Conservative MP. My first surprise was to find James Prior and Geoffrey Howe coming up the stairs behind me. Then I found that all the poets had been given red roses to wear, to distinguish them from the politicians. This was hardly necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked ...”

“... Troilus and Criseyde, set with pagan aplomb in ancient Troy, he approvingly quotes the rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s New Poetics. For all his fame as a master of the low style, Chaucer does not really breach decorum: the bawdiest Canterbury Tales are told by pilgrims of the lowest station, and incongruity is deployed with deliberately comic or satirical ...”

“... Xenopsylla cheopis,’ she says, ‘haunts this book like a tiny destroying angel.’ It is the best transmitter of the bacterium from rat to rat, or from rat to human, because when the flea has fed on a plague sufferer, the bacterium grows in its stomach, blocking it. The hungry flea then feeds again, regurgitating Yersinia in its saliva into the new host ...”

“... Fisher still addresses the matter of his city: the ‘Handsworth Liberties’ cycle is one of the best works of his mid-career. But there is a new interest in how places are made in writing, in the chorography of a page. It is sad to find ‘Handsworth Liberties’ excluded from The Dow Low Drop, and regret becomes disgruntlement when the sheer extent of the ...”

“... prejudice!’); people are called ‘elements’. The book is perhaps best considered as a novel-length folk tale, a parable: sparely narrated, crudely sophisticated, full of harsh nonsense. Andrei Platonov was born Andrei Platonovich Klimentov in 1899. He grew up in an industrial settlement on the margins of the southern Russian ...”

“... of Lord David Cecil, et cetera, and became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret – the next best thing, perhaps, to Betjeman bagging a royal. His relationship with Cavendish was clearly one of the most important in his life, but the reader is left to infer from Hillier’s silences, or to guess from the odd clue or glimpse, the precise details and ...”

“... ought to know what to expect from a book called The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, by Geoffrey de Ste Croix, whose career as an ancient historian began after the war when he was a mature student at University College, London under the great A. H. M. Jones. Jones’s Athenian Democracy (1960) remains the ...”

“... seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not buying up industrial companies or running Oxford United. But it is not the same. The Mirror is cracked and the images confused. It is part of the history of the British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up ...”

“... Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing in Zwemmer’s as a schoolboy, he had encountered Surrealism in its heyday and news of the Surrealist revolution in Europe in the mid-Thirties transformed his ...”

“... of Dr Sacheverell (1973), which remains the standard account of the cleric’s career, the late Geoffrey Holmes wondered if Sacheverell’s soaring high churchmanship ‘contains in its very extremity more than a hint of revulsion from his own tainted stock’. This twistedness was not so apparent in his earlier years. As a teenager at Magdalen ...”

“... effective majorities secured, though in Wales only by a whisker.By contrast, the UK debates on how best and how much to tax have often been thoughtful and of enduring value. There are Adam Smith’s four criteria for a good tax: ability to pay, certainty of impact, convenience and cheapness of collection. The 18th century was well aware of what we now call the ...”

“... gentleman of the old school. The eldest son inherited the mysterious gift of producing an instant best-seller; Molly, one of the daughters by a previous marriage, became a famous water-diviner. When the treacherous Robert produced Goodbye to all that, the long-suffering father, who had supported and encouraged the son for many years and received in return ...”

“... some contemporaries by decades. Before many people had heard of either Michael Heseltine or Geoffrey Howe, they were juniors to Cabinet mogul Walker, first at Environment and then at Trade and Industry. Walker still insists that Heath never deserved to lose, and believes Heath’s style of politics, a Toryism he represents as both paternalistic and ...”