“... around from beyond the grave?) A final credit should be given to the admirable illustrations by John Lawrence, which themselves suggest the interesting precedent of Brisley Le Fanu’s wash drawings to accompany Sheridan’s tales. In giving us an additional, visual register against which to check the ambiguities and intimations of the narrative, the ...”

“... I begin to realise that the courage Trimble displayed at the peace talks, the great risk he took there, has given a significant section of the Unionist community a new imaginative charge. It would be sentimental to say that the spirit of those 18th-century Presbyterians is behind the words of the News Letter, but something has radically changed here. On ...”

“... which characterised the period of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Furthermore, its emergence took place ‘in the margin’: that is to say, outside the customary academic and intellectual writing centres in the United States. The Language Movement deliberately eschewed those centres and developed its own audiences, avenues of communication, and organs ...”

“... given way to Bebe Rebozo. Watergate scattered this group in all directions (including jail) and it took some imagination to believe that much the same group would take over power again just six years later – but this is exactly what happened. Reagan re-installed such Nixon stalwarts as Haig, Shultz, Weinberger and Casey, while Ed Meese and Larry Speakes gave ...”

“... were we to need reminding – that a death has meaning. ‘Tragedy, which might be noble,’ John Kerrigan remarks, ‘always, just the same, means waste’; as though some imagined economy has gone awry. Either there’s an anomaly in the system, or there’s no system. What happened at Dunblane is called a tragedy because we take it for granted that ...”

“... left – Frank was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and Bell.) Immediately after ...”

“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... head was about to be struck off. ‘Where is it?’ Starkey’s account of what the martyrologist John Foxe called, in the short novel included in his Book of Martyrs, ‘the miraculous preservation of the Lady Elizabeth’, is detailed and thorough, one of the most insightful short histories of the reign of Mary, and it corrects many supposed facts and a ...”

“... There is a novel by John Masefield called ODTAA. Its title stands for ‘One Damn Thing After Another’. This would be a good title for a biography of George Gascoigne. Despite having a fine crop of literary firsts to his name (the first Italian-style comedy in English, one of the very first versions of a Greek tragedy in English, and one of the earliest systematic discussions of English metre), he was one of the unluckiest English poets ...”

“... an expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside ...”

“... to come to trial is over a year. That is almost twenty weeks longer than the same process took in 2019. A claim can be steadfastly denied right up until the moment it is suddenly admitted on the eve of trial; there is almost never any sanction for such conduct. The unscrupulous can therefore delay the day of reckoning, or avoid it altogether if people ...”

“... and he wasn’t the only violent misogynist at large on the island. There was her former classmate John Stickney, a bomb enthusiast who blew himself up while stalking his ex-girlfriend. There was her near neighbour, George Waterfield Russell Jr, aka the Eastside Killer, who was apprenticing as a prowler and peeping Tom during the same period, before killing ...”

“... adopted, I was spared the binding notion of blood, with all its passion and fatalism. I simply took the platitude and stood it on its head. I am no longer sure what to think, except that this interest in origins is a perversity on my part, like going back over a dispute that was settled years ago. Doubly perverse because of my debt to water. I owe nothing ...”

“... a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a love-object, though her reality is pretty foggy. John Stuart Mill read the poem attentively in preparation for a review which never appeared, although Browning did later get to see his notes and was understandably struck by one of Mill’s sharper comments: ‘The writer seems to me possessed with a more ...”

“... on municipal politics. After he was elected mayor in 1873, his administration took over the private gas and water companies which had failed to provide clean water and reliable heating – ‘a degree of state intervention that was not to be carried out at a national level until after 1945’. (In the thick of the takeover Chamberlain, who ...”