“... does, but a book ought the more to care about distinguishing such lightness from airiness:   Edward Young’s Night Thoughts were hugely successful at the time but are forgotten now, although occasionally there is some academic attempt to revive interest in them by placing them in their context, etc. The selection here provided is enough to show ...”

“... Suppose Mr and Mrs Coleridge to be young SDP yuppies today, who have asked us to dinner. What impression of each should we get? Of an amiable but very silly young man who talked too much and put on a great show of domestic warmth and solidarity? Of a capable and animated young woman, witty and elegant without being a show-off; devoted to the husband without making a display of it; admirable cook, makes all her own clothes? That would be about right ...”

“... grandfather had married into the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the service of Edward IV. Charles’s father was William Brandon, who according to the Paston letters got himself a bad reputation, ‘for that he should have by force ravished and swived an ancient gentlewoman, and yet was not therewith eased, but swived her oldest ...”

“... unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of York, which extended over all that country.’ Is it any wonder that the Venetian historian Sabellicus ‘calleth Scotland ...”

“... and Lord Kilmarnock used their last moments together to dismiss the idea that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, their ‘bonnie prince’, could have signed such an order. They both ‘vehemently denied’ it before they walked to the scaffold. Whether Cumberland himself was aware of the forgery, or even arranged it, is not known.The duke was disconcertingly ...”

“... begun to feel like a weekly basis. More striking still, perhaps, are the new forms of support act. Edward Mendelson describes his critical study of Mrs Dalloway as a guide to the novel’s ‘inner life’. Mark Hussey’s is subtitled ‘Biography of a Novel’. What next for the literary masterpiece, one wonders. Birthday cards? A retirement gong?Daunted by ...”

“... own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom? Edward P. Jones is unfashionably interested in fate and endings, and likes to gaze at the wide horizons of his characters’ extinctions. His remarkable novel, The Known World (2003), owes something to The Mayor of Casterbridge: in it he broods knowingly, like ...”

“... essays of Section One are about the voice of innocence: he truculently pays tribute to his young father and to Henry Ford on their hopeless Oscar II expedition. ‘Ford perceived that war is murder,’ he asserts. (A more cautious writer might have preferred ‘supposed’ to ‘perceived’.) He demands respect for those American eccentrics who were ...”

“... Reign of Love’ – was replaced by that of ‘Bloody Bill’ Marsden, an outstanding sadist. The young Hogg, as Lewis puts it, ‘co-operated enthusiastically in Marsden’s disciplinary reforms’. What can that mean? That he flogged smaller boys with a passion rare even in that intensely homoerotic environment? And his only redeeming feature, his ...”

“... right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George ...”

“... the matters described. The record is relatively immune from this difficulty until 1950, when the young Wedgwood Benn was elected in a by-election for Bristol South-East to succeed the ailing Stafford Cripps. Up to this point the story is told in family correspondence, from which a complicated but largely sympathetic figure emerges. As the ‘baby of the ...”

“... groundbreaking biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the ...”

“... In the mid-1570s they entered Elizabeth’s court under the tutelage of Sidney’s father. With Edward Dyer the young friends formed that ‘happy trinity’ of poets, Sidney Striving with my mates in song, Mixing mirth our songs among. In 1577, the all too early peak of Sidney’s political career, Greville accompanied ...”

“... recruited through provincial grammar schools’. This question supplies the chief interest of Edward Pearce’s biography of John Major, a book sympathetic to its subject which – except at the end – lacks the author’s admirable blend of fun and savage indignation. John Major is a prime minister about whom so far we know virtually nothing except how ...”

“... are two stories here, the public and the private one. The public story should have gone like this: young, fair-haired Guards officer, keen as mustard, goes to the wars, performs deeds of derring-do, is badly wounded, shipped – and flown – home to a hero’s welcome. But the hero’s welcome was missing. The walking wounded were greeted at RAF Brize Norton ...”