“... the elusively reforming political stance of its more famous companion piece. More muses about the best state of a commonwealth in one of his epigrams (it goes roughly: ‘do we want a king or a Senate? – hang on, if we have the power to answer this question then we must already be kings; and if we are not kings we’d better shut up and stay out of ...”

“... by Andersen Consulting that though the firm’s tender was higher than others, the best possible candidate to provide the computer system was (wait for it) Andersen Consulting. ‘It is clearly wrong,’ the MPs said, ‘for somebody who is tendering for National Health Service business also to be advising the National Health Service as their ...”

“... thirteen billion years ago in the range of wavelengths detectable by the human eye are now best seen in the infrared. (Crudely put, the light has been stretched into longer waves.) To make the observatory sensitive to this redshifted light, the hexagonal segments that make up JWST’s primary mirror are coated with a thin layer of gold, which is much ...”

“... his own carriage, half of which contained his bespoke darkroom. The Ministry of Transport did its best to accommodate the unusual traveller and his considerable baggage. He was, after all, a man of importance: Tsar Nicholas II had received him personally in 1909 and requested more of his striking colour images. But ...”

“... journalists; there wouldn’t be a proprietor pulling the strings. I might have been less naive if Nicholas Garland’s story of the muddle-and-fudge launch of the daily Independent, in his book Not Many Dead, had then been available. I might have thought differently, too, if I’d known that the inspiration for that innovatory Review dummy had been Motorcycle ...”

“... has suffered an alteration, and the architect of these Baroque edifices turns out to be one Nicholas Dyer – with a career as Wren’s protégé but a life-history significantly different from the real Hawksmoor’s. Here Superintendent Hawksmoor turns out to be a senior detective based on (new) New Scotland Yard, where his predecessor had worked from ...”

“... wine trade at the British Library later that day. That older trade tends to be skated over. Nicholas Faith’s The Winemasters of Bordeaux (1978) begins, more or less, with Pepys’s visit to the Royal Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I ...”

“... He glances at some recent works in the canon: Robin Hardy’s rather unconvincing The Wicker Man, Nicholas Roeg’s dazzling Don’t look now, even William Friedkin’s grotesque gallimaufry The Exorcist – whose best section was surely its prologue, jangling the nerves with a loud, jumpy soundtrack broken by the sudden ...”

“... and low road to incomes policy in The Socialist Agenda.* Owen’s thoughts on incomes policy are best read in conjunction with theirs, just as his chapter on Equality is better read with Nicholas Bosanquet’s recent pamphlet, ‘Signposts for the Eighties’,† which points to the new challenge of inequality within the ...”

“... freelance agent. Since diplomatic cover was not an option, his schoolfriend and fellow MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott got him a job as a stringer for the Observer and the Economist. Beirut made good sense as a posting: his father, St John Philby, a well-known Arabist, was living there at the time, and the Middle East was an area of growing interest to British ...”

“... adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the point. Number two in my list of all-time favourites ...”

“... dialogue, or new features, such as verse translations from Roman poets, he was doing his best to perfect a still flexible language and literature. In 1441, he held a literary contest in Florence, the Certame coronario. The learned judges disagreed in their evaluation of the submitted poems and refused to award the silver crown to any of the ...”

“... Gothic texts, some sort of metempsychosis or rebirth. Both of these men are disturbed or mad. Nicholas Dyer is imagined as the builder of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches in the East End of London: the enlightened edifices of a rational Christianity are thereby ascribed to a devil-worshipper, while the name ...”

“... the quick genius of his creativity, its speedy sublime. (He would write a one-act play, one of his best works, about Mozart and Salieri, in which Salieri, maddened by Mozart’s genius and ‘idle wantonness’, poisons him. One of the four so-called Little Tragedies, it is too brief to have been often staged, and is difficult to find in English. Besides, it ...”

“... Wordsworth come from? Where did he get that sublime sense of something indescribable but urgent? Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years first appeared thirty years ago – too late to help me with my A-Level essay. The new introduction to the second edition contains a persuasive reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a ...”