“... male peacock has never had a free pass. ‘Of all handicrafts,’ the satirical magazine the Town said in 1838, ‘that of tailoring appears to be the most successful in the way of coining money. We might compare it to witchcraft.’ According to Bespoke: The Men’s Style of Savile Row by James Sherwood, even Queen Victoria got in on the act, writing to her ...”

“... otherwise laudatory, attributed to Forster’s art. ‘The very poise of Mr Forster’s art,’ he said,‘has something equivocal about it – it seems to be conditioned by its not knowing what kind of poise it is.’ Quoting a paragraph from A Passage to India, about the Krishna ceremony, a paragraph in which Forster’s touch seems sure and then ...”

“... network conveniently domiciled in neutral Switzerland. ‘Austria,’ Zita was reported to have said, ‘did not desire to be ruined for the sake of saving Alsace-Lorraine for Germany.’ The Germans got wind of the intrigue and bullied the Austrian emperor into disavowing it; as a result, the German grip on the Habsburg monarchy was tightened and the ...”

“... Despite​ explicit warnings,’ Chilcot said, introducing his report, ‘the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.’ A good deal of the blame for this has to be laid at the door of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Chilcot listed four possible consequences that many people had identified before the war was launched: the risk of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and increased al-Qaida activity ...”

“... a tougher task than any of the other authors in this sample. He is writing the latest volume in Edward Arnold’s ‘New History of England’, and is faced with the alarming task of imposing balance and order on a field like Matthew Arnold’s two Hinkseys, in which nothing stays the same. Professor Hirst has for some time cast himself as the advocate of ...”

“... Edington. The second covers the rest of Alfred’s reign and takes us on into the reign of his son Edward. The third covers the reign of Alfred’s grandson Athelstan the Victorious, and his successors Kings Edmund and Eadred. The suitably dramatic terminal event is the killing of the Norwegian Eirik Bloodaxe, briefly king of York, at Stainmore in the Pennines ...”

“... did Cromwell think any better of the Petition of Right, the reprise of Magna Carta designed by Sir Edward Coke to recall Charles I to his constitutional duty: according to Coke’s grandson Roger, he called it ‘the Petition of Shite’. I can find scant mention of this menacing language and conduct in those biographies of Cromwell which have a soft spot for ...”

“... less claustrophobic. From the point in the story where Emily and Louisa (who married Tom Conolly, said to be the richest man in Ireland) settled in their new homes, Carton and Castletown respectively, we get reports of everything that went on in these two houses and their parks. Nearly twenty pages are given up to what, in content, could be a talk to the ...”

“... may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled by the real proprietors of said land to do competent work for his living. And who are these ‘real proprietors’? ‘The Saxon British.’ It was ‘heroic White men’ who turned the ‘oozy jungle’ into fertile plantations for ‘idle Black men’ to neglect. ‘Banish all White men ...”

“... who took her provincial style in hand and then left her, to Oxford, to Aldermaston, and via Edward and Dorothy Thompson, to the watering hole of the New Left at the Partisan in Carlisle Street in Soho. It’s a fair geography of the early 1960s. People had begun wandering about, and unless you stayed put, you were bound to meet them. They were delighted ...”

“... of him?’ Carrère asks himself, or the reader, before whisking us back to the early 1980s, when Edward Limonov – Ukrainian émigré poet, recently down and out in New York – arrives in Paris, ‘crowned by the success of his scandalous novel, It’s Me, Eddie’. Limonov is a comet blazing across the local literary cosmos ‘where I’, Carrère tells ...”

“... ache to the sharp pain. ‘You get used to it and you realise it’s just a performance,’ she said. ‘Final warning! How many final warnings have I had? A million.’ According to the money education charity Credit Action, the average British household is £8000 in debt, not including mortgages. The banks may lose out when a borrower goes bust, but they ...”

“... Greene had nominated Auden as the new voice. The six odes and the epilogue of The Orators, Greene said, justified Auden’s ‘being named in the same breath as Lawrence’.But Greene had some misgivings. ‘The subject of the book,’ he said, ‘is political, though it is hard to tell whether the author’s sympathies are ...”

“... gave him credit for. At the heart​ of this dispute was the problem of violence. Much has been said about why Sartre – or Jeanson, or Alleg – could countenance it, while Camus found it repellent. In the 1940s he had excused violence as a grim French necessity in the face of defeat and occupation; it was not the servant of a grand idea. Yet in the ...”

“... one of themselves. But Sonnet 20 proves conclusively that he was sexually normal.’ Hallet Smith said of Sonnet 20: ‘The attitude of the poet toward the friend is one of love and admiration, deference and possessiveness, but it is not at all a sexual passion’; Robert Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active ...”