“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the stem – in some other ancillary tasks and in cigarette-making, not much in cigar-rolling. The best jobs went to whites: ‘Stringent requirements needed to be met to become a master cigar-maker, sorter or box-decorator, as entry into the cream of the cigar trades became restricted along race and craft lines, as much by the white workers as the ...”

“... as a place to work – ‘there was cheerful, productive anarchy; everyone did what they loved best,’ the composer and one-time producer, Alexander Goehr remembers – and as a medium for listening to. Peter Maxwell Davies recalls how, as a boy on a council estate in Swinton, he would listen ‘every evening, more or less from the moment it started till ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was scandalised by its demotic Glaswegian, and went on the attack with a pamphlet, The Ugly Birds without Wings. His ire was unquenched four years ...”

“... their makers was manifest in the published results of a recent Time Out poll to choose the ‘100 Best Films’ and with them a ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Best Actor’. (‘Best Female Star’ and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was good enough for Büchner, in his play Woyzeck, it should be good enough for us. Like the best of recent historians of psychiatry, Herdman starts in his book with some reflections on Christian accounts of madness, and how Christianity sees Reason and Unreason as doubles, and how many early Christians were themselves seen as mad. In the writings of St ...”