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“... And the seediest of these parson-scribes found a natural home in the Grub Street of the day, an acre or two of foundling newspapers and inky warrens, inhabited, as Dr Johnson had it, ‘by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems’. Small history has a firm memory of some of these characters, but I doubt if they have ever been ...”

“... giants, will challenge gods and men. Odin wants his first team available and in training for the day. Not that it will make any difference, for it is known that the gods and heroes will lose, Thor dead from poison spat by the Midgard-Serpent, Odin swallowed by Fenrir, Frey killed by the fire-giant Surt. There may be a new world after the destruction, but ...”

“... consequences of inaction’. Obstruction of justice happened, but largely by accident, because day-to-day politicking and public relations obscured the legal issues at stake. But what about morals and plain decency? In a series of articles that first appeared in the New Yorker as Watergate unfolded, Elizabeth Drew ...”

“... at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil Burke, a mad Manhattan septuagenarian who leads a storefront chapel called the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, with a congregation of four. In the morning he descends to the Times Square subway station and writes ‘REPENT!’ on ...”

“... member. But being who he was, Maudling didn’t stick long with this vision. Once Heath won the day he quickly rallied to a less sophisticated Europeanism. Politically, he is best remembered now for the somewhat suspect boom he unleashed as chancellor in 1962-64. Harold Wilson, worried that the Tories led by Maudling might be unbeatable, always claimed that ...”

“... as peers of both Modernists and Georgians; and no reader could then have been blamed for thinking Day-Lewis, say, as important as Auden and the same kind of poet. If in 1820 there had been an anthology of the Cockney school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New ...”

“... night in 1763, after an assignation with a beautiful Covent Garden actress. But the next day ‘came sorrow. Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea.’ The arrival of the Signor was heralded by ‘damned twinges’, ‘scalding heat’ and the excrescence of ‘deep-tinged loathsome matter’. ‘I rose very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... In any case, aren’t we actually living through the decline of the political cartoon? On the day I write, the national dailies contain just one true specimen between them. In the Daily Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind ...”

“... the potential excitements of a life like Madonna’s seem to melt away under scrutiny – another day, another million dollars. Madonna Unauthorised is full of names of people who were forgotten by the time they reached the page, or which belong to people who were never more than a footnote in the subject’s great narrative. And most people are a footnote to ...”

“... to kill one German during the Battle of the Somme. Two million shells fired in eight hours on one day at Verdun. Eighty-five per cent of German men between 17 and 50 mobilised. Advances in medicine meant that more than 80 per cent of wounded British soldiers were returned to some form of duty. Governments discovered that they could squeeze far more out of ...”

“... recover and absorb Gaelic literary tradition. Then, towards the end of the century, figures like Douglas Hyde and Yeats made the Celtic Revival, as it was called, a powerful cultural and political force. Their subject-matter was heroic, mythic, folkloric, and cast in narrative and ballad forms. The Revival, Romanticism’s death-rattle, was an effort to ...”

“... hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about ...”

“... of Hemon’s earlier work, the narrator is reconstructing the past at a time close to the present day. It emerges that the account we are reading came to the narrator via a woman called Rahela – ‘Pinto would tell Rahela many years later’. But it’s another hundred pages before we find out that Rahela is Osman’s daughter, born in the Fergana Valley in ...”

“... to function in the Thirties; it was in Garrick Yard and had been Chippendale’s workshop and when Douglas Byng first used the stable for a night-club in the Twenties Chippendale’s lathe was still hanging from a beam. All Motley’s costumes were stored there and when it was blitzed early in the war John G. came down the morning after and found nothing ...”