“... a reputation as Leftists. The two officers at the centre of this molehunt were Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Wright was a brilliant scientist and a grammar-school patriot who always doubted the patriotism of his public-school superiors. He held extreme right-wing views. His devotion to rooting out Lefties at the top placed him at the head of the Fluency ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion in his charming art.’ So Henry James summed up the career of his great predecessor in his Hawthorne of 1879. James was usually a shrewd critic, but ‘charming’ is hardly the adjective that first leaps to mind when the modern reader confronts ...”

“... modern practitioners as L.P. Hartley and Walter de la Mare, to the definitive achievements of M.R. James, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and their Gothic predecessors. The ghost story, or original tale of the supernatural, was essentially a short story, delicately crafted to obtain the maximum effect from its metaphysical equivocations. If it did not aspire to the ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... of the harbour at Belle-Ile, broadly painted in bright colours, marks the influence of John Peter Russell, the Australian artist, who’d been a friend of Van Gogh. At the end of that year Matisse painted The Dinner Table – quite big, more than three feet by four – a late Impressionist interior, innocuous enough one might think, yet the first in a ...”

“... Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall where we were ...”

“... the last three years. Soloists with the chorus of praise have been distinguished and influential: Peter Porter, John Carey, John Bayley – and Raine himself has by no means been indisposed with laryngitis. His position in literary journalism and his access to the popularising media have played their part in his promotion. And the result of this rapid ...”

“... was the era of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, when the masque was at its extravagant height under James I, and in 1613, around the time this portrait was painted, Lanier composed his first masque song, ‘Bring away this sacred tree’, and performed it at court in The Squires’ Masque. Lanier was looking for advancement and perhaps having his picture ...”

“... she wanted to play the game in 1849 on a visit to Mansfield to meet the family of her new fiancé, James Collinson. By now, at the age of nineteen, her poems had been accepted in the national press, and after the despair that her father’s illness had cast on the whole household, she was enjoying again the audacious conversation and artistic ambition of the ...”

“... persons inside me, the good and the evil, and the evil usually overcame the good’) and Baronne James de Rothschild, who surprises you by her modern face, handsome, but also intelligent and amusing. In their own terms, these are almost faultless. Ingres's portrait of the Comtess de Tournon, 1812 Portraiture is an anxious craft, however, and Ingres was ...”

“... who turned to the church only as the next best thing. It seems to have been at the behest of King James I, who valued the theological learning in which Donne was proficient, that he opted for ordination. Certainly the decision was in keeping with the spirit of a royal entourage where scholarly divinity mingled easily with worldly complaisance. He landed a ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel has been caught in the Gadarene rush of fiction brought out in time for the Booker Prize deadline. It won’t be lost in this year’s profusion of titles, and it won’t be harmed by the published assurance of a colleague of his on the Times that it is ‘a sure contender’ for the prize ...”