“... the Duke of Windsor will resume his throne and Henry Williamson replace the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. If these instructions and predictions derive from a genuine document, then that document is Audenesque. But Auden’s voice can be heard in less fantastic moments: the lights of a car sweeping across a bedroom, as in that fine early poem later ...”

“... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John Stuart Mill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from such equiphobia as well – or rather, that ...”

“... of most country house society. The emotional ties proved enduring but also unequal. Balfour always took more than he gave, inspiring love but granting only friendship in return. The pattern was set early on, and for the rest of their lives brother and sister danced to his tune. George was eventually promoted to the Cabinet, but when the time came to sack him ...”

“... inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh ...”

“... a rival élite, a new interest, a putative power structure. It was these people, by and large, who took over the moribund Labour Parties in the constituencies and who are now advancing their power within the corrupt and rotten Trade Union movement. And most of what Benn has said in the years of his power bid has been directed, not at the general public who ...”

“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”

“... troops, Synghman Rhee’s openly-proclaimed ambitions and the coincidental presence of the hawkish John Foster Dulles in Seoul have been cited in evidence, but none of the works under review provides any substantiation for this interpretation. The scale and weight of the North Korean attack speaks for itself. And as Max Hastings properly reminds us, the United ...”

“... unmitigated heroism, perhaps most memorably embodied in that antique Glyndebourne recording with John Brownlee as the Don, remains a moving and impressive protest against the authority of the old over the young. Surely a Catholic opera would have shown Don Giovanni less courageous, more cringing and repentant. I offer such reservations, not as a severe ...”

“... of a Notting Hill bookshop and a reader of Stendhal; her first novel A Start in Life (1981) took its title from Balzac and had a heroine whose life was ‘ruined by literature’. Nor is Rachel unusual in feeling a strong attraction towards people for whom comfort is more important than culture. In her case, the soothing solidity of the bourgeois is ...”

“... stiff competition. Levi in his bibliography does not bother to mention studies by Peter Quennell, John Lehmann, Joanna Richardson and Susan Chitty, among others. He does, however, pay his warm respects to Vivien Noakes’s definitive Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, reissued 1985). Noakes has reviewed Levi’s book – ‘a joyous ...”

“... to yourself,’ in an address to the Rambler about plainsong. Such support made the fastidious John Henry Newman shudder. ‘A profound silence’, he suggested, was the only way ‘to bear such blushing honours’. Nothing in Pugin’s life was more dramatic than his own transformation from talented but undirected dilettante to Roman Catholic ...”

“... charity worker. She created jobs for unemployed women, ran restaurants to feed refugees, took responsibility for six hundred orphans fleeing occupied Belgium. France awarded her the cross of the Legion of Honour. The literary establishment was not so grateful. Her writings about the war were less successful than the earlier novels of manners. A Son ...”

“... at an alarming rate. Much later, he wrote in Philately magazine about the find: One evening ... I took down from its shelf my old schoolboy collection of stamps, wondering and hoping that the whole lot might make a couple of pounds. Turning over the pages I came across one which had a solitary stamp mounted in the middle of it. Why it was stuck on a page to ...”

“... and with it the supply of those superbly expressive hysterics – such as Dora and Anna O. – who took starring roles in Freud’s casebook. What then is left of hysteria as a definable syndrome? Showalter admits that the line between hysterical symptoms and psychosomatic ones is unclear, but her own penchant for diagnosis at a distance seems to muddy the ...”

“... she was a showgirl and moved into his flat, though they never had sex, not with each other. He took her to dinner parties where lords and ladies hurried through their desserts so that they could undress and orgify before Keeler had to leave for her parading and hostessing duties at Murray’s, a classy strip club. She accompanied him, stopping sometimes on ...”