“... yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political reality. The philosopher Charles Taylor has remarked that politics is ‘what’s going on’, or something to that effect. But how the hell are we to know what’s going on, I thought while on my way to the Trades Union Congress? What is going on is in some part what we say is going on: but if ...”

“... war they’ve just fought. It must have been a scholarly version of this syndrome that led A.J.P. Taylor to pronounce, as late as 1965, that ‘the Second World War, unlike the First, produced no distinctive literature. There were no war poets during the war, and no war novels or memoirs after it.’ You still sometimes hear this argument. One reason is that ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and ...”

“... book is high. Hellman is not the only snotty famous person to fall under her jaded eye. James Taylor and Carly Simon, Hellman’s guests one sunny afternoon, ‘smile stiffly’ at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the ...”

“... 1581 was the young dramatist. The major new fact with which Honigmann backs up the theory is that John Cottom, who was for a time a schoolmaster at Stratford, appears in the same will. Both Hoghton and the schoolmaster were Catholics; and there is evidence that Shakespeare’s father was a recusant. These factors would help to explain why Shakespeare might ...”

“... and are alike in seeming to celebrate the life that can still be led there by the right people. In John Buchan’s, dear old glamorous Fullcircle wins over what he presents as a bloody awful married couple – ‘Hampstead’ progressives – to a pagan-Catholic frame of mind, while Edith Wharton’s house, Bells, nearest post-office Thudeney-Blazes, tries the ...”

“... The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and could boast of very considerable house property in the city. Their rags have been exchanged for ...”

“... they discerned the ‘colouring’ and ‘diction’ of Shakespeare’s younger contemporary John Fletcher, rather than Shakespeare himself, in the play. Others objected that as for ‘the tale of this play being built upon a novel in Don Quixote, chronology is against us, and Shakespeare could not be the author.’ This last, at least, Theobald was able ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... only be – imagined as black. ‘As the judge will not have failed to register,’ the journalist John Carlin writes in Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, ‘if his story were true – and even if it were not – the faceless intruder of his imagination had to have had a black face, because the fact was that for white people crime mostly did ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”

“... last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five ...”

“... the leading counsel on the North-East barristers’ circuit. The top barrister in the Ward case, John Cobb QC, is dead. The second QC brought in to prosecute Judith Ward, then a rising star at the bar called Peter Taylor QC, is now the Lord Chief Justice. From his office and from that of Mr Walsh there has been not a ...”

“... would seem as mysteriously given as the planet Venus, is guilty of the offence. When A.J.P. Taylor remarked that he had extreme views but held them moderately, he may have meant, as Fish would be bound to claim, that he did not really hold them at all. He was, after all, being interviewed for a Magdalen College fellowship at the time. But he may have ...”

“... one merits Norman Davies’s unqualified approval. It is an arresting retrieval from oblivion. John Lingard’s eight-volume History of England (1819) has been thinly, if ever, read during the last hundred years. But, written by a Catholic priest, it escaped the grip of both nationalism and Protestantism. It gave, uniquely, something like a global ...”