“... fixed units of ghostly narrative seem to circulate endlessly – the body in the basement, the white lady, the hooded monk – just waiting for a suitable place to take up residence: often the same story concerning Anne Boleyn or the headless horseman or whoever will be found in various locations. And fiction constantly gives the ghost-seers new ...”

“... now, his limbs radiant, his youth restored, his sex splendidly erect, the discs of his white ears sparkling, a convivial fellow; he eats without self-restraint from the celestial menu. And when the Sabbath comes (the Sabbath of Sabbaths, which flowers every seven centuries in the perpetual Sabbath of Eden), as usual he avoids the congregation of ...”

“... greatness. They have been performed magnificently by, for example, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and the White Stripes. Then there was Donovan, a bit like Dan Bern without the sense of humour, or the critical distance. A.J. Weberman, self-styled Dylanologist, burrowed into the singer’s rubbish bins to try to make sense of him. And countless others have applied ...”

“... of postwar hopefulness that things could change. My editor during those excited days of hope, Christopher Falkus at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, asked me to contribute to a book of essays by women on what they thought had shaped them as women. The Virgin Mary was the single most dominant and crucial element in my female life so far, and so I wrote a short piece ...”

“... interpretation. Complexities​ of interpretation are food and drink to Petrarchan scholars, and Christopher Celenza tucks into them with quiet determination in his short life-and-works overview, Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer. The subtitle is taken from one of Petrarch’s verse letters, where he describes himself as ‘peregrinus ubique’ (more precisely ...”

“... suggest that even the shock of world war is insufficient to explain such a widespread phenomenon. Christopher Thorne’s The Issue of War is a brave and immensely erudite attempt to consider the effects of the Allied-Japanese war of 1941-1945 on all the societies involved, including New Zealand’s. One point that emerges unquestionably is that the failure of ...”

“... years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but it is still ...”

“... ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’. The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books ...”

“... think they can escape by buying into a ‘company town’ such as Olivar, a previously rich and white coastal suburb, the beaches now submerged by rising sea levels, the land and infrastructure owned by a single offshore trust. Others stuff their faces with street drugs such as ‘pyro’, which makes fire-starting feel even better than all other drugs put ...”

“... ingratiating patter of the likes of Rollo Swaveley (the well-known public relations consultant), Christopher Smoothe (Minister of Chance and Speculation), and the Bishop of Twicester, to the more extended self-justifications of social comedy was a natural progression. Nevertheless Frayn was always wedded to print, and to parody. Towards the End of the ...”

“... in her. Things changed in the 20th century. Indeed, the modern age has overturned the assertion of White Kennet, an early 18th-century bishop of Peterborough, that ‘Qu. Elizabeth had a Camden, and King Charles a Clarendon, but poor James I has had I think none but paltry scribblers.’ The rise of the historical novel and the popular biography has produced a ...”

“... I used to go to clandestine meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as it seems in retrospect ...”

“... novelist, according to Kenneth Ramchand, is how to handle the ‘language of the master’ – the white predecessor who stands ambivalently as former slave-owner and literary source. Heath’s method is to thin his style to a minimum, owing the least possible debt. At times this is overdone, and the narrative reads as bleakly as statistics or genealogy. Taken ...”