“... to be endured’: meaning, I suppose, that I congratulate Mr Baker on a brilliant performance and hope he will not want to repeat it. Howie is an oddly elusive creation; his mind is recorded in every tremor of its movement, and yet – perhaps because his relationships with others are barely adumbrated – we miss a personality, and are thus obliged to forgo ...”

“... heads and through this frightful din.’A Letter to the Dead, edited by Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye, is a new edition of Roberts’s Collected Poems; the first was published in 2005, ten years after her death, at which point her work had been out of print for decades. (There was an earlier attempt to put out a Collected in 1998, edited by John ...”

“... knickers. In the critical afterword to The Quincunx, his 1989 attempt at a neo-Victorian novel, Charles Palliser says that the main ingredient of the recipe is ‘inversion’. Take Jane Eyre, turn it upside down, shake well and you get Wide Sargasso Sea. The simplest, and bestselling, example of such inversion is George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman ...”

“... was 35 and stricken with malaria in what is now Indonesia when, in 1858, he wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in England that would send Darwin into a tailspin. In a feverish ‘flash of light’, Wallace had independently stumbled on the theory of natural selection. Darwin had been working on the idea for some twenty years, but had not yet ...”

“... read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about corpses being committed to their snows by English clergymen – Switzerland was not yet an English colony, though beginning to look like one – and the bodies were reinterred at ...”

“... at the end, and its underlying emotional force is generated by the traditional Judeo-Christian hope for supernatural revenge upon one’s enemies. The stings of the world are felt in turn. ‘Train-bands’ are the militia, and ‘mates’ are fellows or boon companions: a macho company has shown up at his house (‘where I lay’) to bait the lone ...”

“... directed this time towards drumming up support for the treaty in the House of Commons in the hope of being made a colonial governor after the war. When the war was over, the Earl of Bute, who had been the young King’s tutor and was now his First Lord of the Treasury and his ‘dearest friend’, insisted on resigning. This meant that William did not ...”

“... this numinous figure has recently been designated ‘the peak performer’ in a detailed study by Charles Garfield, a former world-class weight-lifter who went on to receive a doctorate in clinical psychology. Leaving the rats to his behaviourist colleagues, Dr Garfield went out to take a close look at people who have cultivated ‘what the German writer ...”

“... that so frequently darken what Ornette Coleman called the ‘skies of America’ can easily turn hope into alienation. In The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, Baldwin summoned the exhortatory cadences of the preacher he’d been as a teenager. By coming together for the sake of ‘achieving our country’, he argued, politically conscious Blacks and whites ...”

“... Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel). There is panegyric: on Cromwell (Heroic Stanzas), on Charles II (Astraea Redux, To His Sacred Majesty), on the new baby heir to James II (Britannia Rediviva); though never on William and Mary. Theological disputation, first Anglican in complexion (Religio Laici), then Roman Catholic (The Hind and the ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in New York ...”

“... its demented towers and abandoned wings. This is where you finish when the mind snaps beyond all hope of healing. All the unsolved problems have rolled down the hill and stuck, because they can go no further. The school yard is surrounded by a storm-fence to keep out the less determined and more visible spectres of rage. In the mornings – as the children ...”

“... Soon​ after firing James Comey, Donald Trump baited the former FBI director. ‘Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!’ Trump tweeted. Comey replied a month later, while testifying before the Senate intelligence committee. ‘Lordy,’ he said, ‘I hope there are tapes ...”

“... incapable of writing badly, so their reader has other compensations. A specially interesting man, Charles Ritchie, the great friend of Elizabeth Bowen, found in his diary the compensation for his complete failure to be ‘a writer’. Young diarists usually show off. Evelyn Waugh records in 1956 that in the hope of ...”

“... suggest, appealed especially to the middling sort above the poverty line, some of whom could hope to prosper by hard work, frugality and good luck. They needed what Dr Kendall calls a voluntarist theology, of the type that Beza and Perkins gave them and Calvin did not. So far as literate members of congregations are concerned, I think we must stress the ...”