“... unique educational value. Evensong has become more of a cultural icon than a religious event. As Richard Dawkins, no theist, put it, ‘I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.’But Stanford hadn’t set out to be only a church music composer. He had ...”

“... now and then made use of by the Foreign Office’s Information and Research Department. Kingsley Martin: Decayed liberal. Very dishonest; Stephen Spender: Sentimental Sympathiser and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist ...”

“... denunciation of the British administration in India, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. We don’t need theology or metaphysics to understand the enduring legacy of slavery or colonial brutality. We know the social dynamics. In the United States, for example, slavery and segregation were, for a ...”

“... a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian poetry in the Times Literary Supplement shows him at his worst – uninformed and wallowing. Even when he affects to ...”

“... published by Archibald Keppel Cameron Cresswell (1879-1974). On the back of its dust-jacket, Richard Bulliet, a leading American historian of medieval Islam, describes Hillenbrand’s work as ‘the first absolutely essential book on Islamic architecture since Cresswell’. This is no overstatement. Cumulatively, the selection of buildings discussed in ...”

“... whereof ... this sacrament is called the body and blood of Christ.”’ The quotations are from Richard Bonner’s 1547 treatise on the sacrament, and MacCulloch, in a persuasive piece of detective work, identifies this otherwise unknown author with Cranmer himself. From this challenge to the Roman Church’s view of the Eucharist everything else ...”

“... and Europe. This sprawl of conference papers mounts no coherent case, but it does illuminate what Martin Butler, in his alert essay on Stuart masque, calls ‘the invention of Britain’, by throwing open windows to the Continent. A clear view of Europe is worth having not just because the instability of Stuart Britain finds parallels in such Early Modern ...”

“... in wars; the country diaries of curates and Edwardian ladies; prisoners of conscience; Anaïs Nin; Richard Crossman; Tony Benn; Alan Bennett. But on the whole, no. And yet we can’t stop ourselves. These days, if you’re a young writer and you don’t do your own weblog you’re something of an exception, and even for the amateur, the ...”

“... of Germaine Greer’s recent admirable polemic Whitefella Jump Up,2 which it was misguided of Martin Jacques to dismiss as naive and utopian in a recent Guardian review. It is true that the existing system won’t choose that route. Helen Irving has published a survey of Australian constitutional practice, Five Things to Know about the Australian ...”

“... called The Mirror in Europe, Particularly in France. There are passing references to Shakespeare (Richard II’s famous mirror soliloquy) and there’s an excellent extended analysis of a passage in Rilke, as well as scattered references to other European writers; and many of the paintings are German or Dutch. But most of the literary sources are French, and ...”

“... William Sancroft, who acceded to her request for charity and put her in touch with the publisher Richard Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the ...”

“... me directly. The SIS assigned me a codename – Dark Knight – for use in our correspondence (Richard Butler, Unscom’s executive chairman, was Dark Prince). The sites for Unscom inspections were originally determined by declarations made by Iraq. In the first statements it provided to the UN, in April 1991, it underestimated its holdings of chemical ...”

“... or the directors. I send them thank you notes and good wishes, and today comes a lovely card from Martin Freeman, whom I don’t know, but who is so good about the monologue he did (A Chip in the Sugar) that I want to write back and thank him, thus making it like an extract from A Lady of Letters, a thank you letter for a thank you letter. I’m so pleased ...”

“... back in England increasingly infuriated by their distinctly unvalorous and self-indulgent monarch, Richard II. King Henry IV proved a more convincing ruler than Richard, and his time on the Reysen helped excuse his murderous usurpation back home. The Teutonic Knights’ enterprise took three centuries to collapse under the ...”

“... and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who ...”