“... A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy, and that its greatest practitioner was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But if one wished to obtain Coleridge’s seminal book on Shakespeare, as one could obtain Shakespearean Tragedy or Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire, one would have some difficulty. Characteristically, Coleridge never got around to publishing ...”

“... ladder. ‘The West India interest was not just a handful of planters and merchants,’ Michael Taylor writes in the final paragraph of his excellent new book, The Interest, but involved ‘hundreds of MPs, peers, civil servants, businessmen, financiers, landowners, clergymen, intellectuals, journalists, publishers, sailors, soldiers and judges, and all of ...”

“... The Red Badge of Courage​ is generally the only thing about Stephen Crane that readers remember now. The novel, first published in 1895 when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does ...”

“... thrived – the careers of N.F. Simpson, Pinter and Stoppard were nurtured there. Desmond Shawe-Taylor wrote in the New Statesman that ‘the whole musical landscape’ was ‘likely to be transformed by the arrival of the Third Programme’; Edward Sackville-West in Picture Post thought that it could ‘well become the greatest educative and civilising ...”

“... Keeler may or may not have been the most moral woman of the 1960s (my vote would go to Elizabeth Taylor for her belief in the sacred bond of marriages), but the looseness of her definitions is problematical for someone claiming to offer the whole truth. Apart from the moral issue, her assertion that she was never a prostitute is important for her other big ...”

“... place despite the potent opposition of Oswald’s sisters-in-law, who were caring for Andrew and Stephen. Elsa insisted on being called ‘mummy’. ‘Never call that German woman what you called your own mother,’ an aunt had insisted. Guilt and treachery thus informed the children’s first dealings with their stepmother, complicated by bewilderment at ...”

“... Mr Stephen is editing a little dictionary,’ a friend explained to a clergyman foolhardy enough to ask whether Leslie ‘did any writing’. The enterprise in question was the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London ...”

“... of open adversarial justice, and it is soon to end; but I recall that it was only when Peter Taylor became Lord Chief Justice in 1992 that our own criminal appeal court began letting the defence see the case summaries prepared by the court’s officials. Things which you have lived with tend to seem unproblematical until you change them; then you wonder ...”

“... my own interests and on that account I have not given the subject impartial consideration.’ Stephen Lushington, the dashing cricketer-jurist who represented the black men Louis Lecesne and John Escoffery after their unlawful deportation from Jamaica, was identified as the son of an East India Company chairman. The planters of Mauritius, which Britain ...”

“... that there is something false in the cult of the original unrevised version. He takes issue with Stephen Gill, whose Oxford Authors edition of Wordsworth prints the poems ‘in texts in which their original identity is restored’. Thus all the ‘secondary’ work that resulted in the final authorised text, the six-volume Poems of 1849-50, published at the ...”

“... on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to ...”

“... As he would later explain, his work was made easier because he was often left alone, waiting for Stephen Bannon, in whose office he sat: Actually, I would make these appointments, and I would come in and these appointments weren’t kept. So, I would sit on the couch. What I haven’t said is what a humiliating experience it is. Because everybody would look ...”

“... writers so rarely use the phrase ‘my husband’. Then it started to happen again and again. Stephen Amidon, we are told in the Contributors’ Notes, ‘lives in London with his wife and daughter Clementine’. Mr Amidon’s daughter has a name, apparently, but ‘his wife’ does not. Amidon’s story, ‘Echolocation’, turns out to be about a man ...”

“... was slow to appreciate the real threats to national security from Northern Ireland, as both Stephen Lander (the head of the agency from 1996 to 2002) and his successor, Eliza Manningham-Buller, admitted when I interviewed them many years later. Though a senior MI5 officer took on the role of director and co-ordinator of intelligence in 1972, the RUC ...”

“... Dick Morland and others,3 and it is also an operative assumption of the controversial films of Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi and of Steve Bell’s Maggie’s Farm cartoons. It may be that an unlivable and impoverished public sphere – where the buses are all but non-existent and far too expensive, where the inner city is a ‘no-go’ area (especially ...”