“... still accumulates, and how often this month’s masterpieces turn into the schlock of yesteryear. No: the fact is that movie critics have changed. There was once a time when Roger Manvell’s 1944 Pelican Book, Film, was a central work in most British film-buffs’ libraries. There were the Russian early fathers, of course, all tractors and montage; there was ...”

“... was the only surviving portion. In 2002, Worden identified the deist and republican John Toland as the person most likely to have transformed ‘Ludlow, the builder of a godly commonwealth’ of the 1650s into ‘Ludlow, the radical Whig or “real Whig”’ of the 1690s.This enduring deception would appeal to Robert Harris, whose Selling ...”

“... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...”

“... reverential as its title. After maintaining that Cromwell’s ‘Grandeur he deriv’d from Heav’n alone’, that all his ‘parts [were] so equal perfect’, and that ‘Peace was the Prize of all his toils and care,’ Dryden predicted that ‘His Ashes in a peaceful Urne [would] rest.’ It was not to be. Less than two years later, Dryden was addressing ...”

“... Inside, the atmosphere resembles that of an airport terminal. It isn’t just the decor: the large hall, the white walls, the rows of functional seating facing the courtroom doors and the large windows through which the light streams in. Today, the youth court is in session, as it is once a week. Almost all the court’s clientele are dressed in ...”

“... are frightened by these urban mad; respectable citizens good-naturedly ignore them as being of no more account than pigeons and as inscrutable as gang graffiti. In New York and Los Angeles (where they parody the consumer-mad host society by heaping their possessions in supermarket trollies), they are called the ‘homeless’. There is, as far as I ...”

“... were all 4 seene in bed together at one tyme.’ The documentation is scanty, and we have no Jacobean tabloids to furnish us with further juicy details – ‘Immigrants in Group Sex Romp!’ – but one fact which makes the case worth pursuing is the involvement of Shakespeare’s former landlord Christopher Mountjoy. There is an obvious link: like ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”

“... majority of the population still live in houses’. Flats were not popular, nor were town centres. No Englishman would live over a shop if he could help it. It was to the country and the suburbs that the English retreated, to houses which, Muthesius noted with approval, were ‘to live in, not to look at’, practical and unpretentious. If the nation lacked a ...”

“... wrote a contrite and affectionate note to his first wife, Jane, assuring her that there would be no more ‘silly fits’. This curious phrase must, as Stourton supposes, allude to his infidelities. The risk would have been great, even had Clark been travelling by plane. Soon after posting the letter he began an affair with Barbara Desborough. Later, he was ...”

“... Time moves​ in a mysterious way. Wolf Hall, the first instalment of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, appeared more than a decade ago. Its 650 pages covered the years from roughly 1500 to 1535. Three years later came Bring Up the Bodies, which in 410 pages created a tight tragic narrative about Cromwell’s part in the fall of Anne Boleyn over the single year 1535-36 ...”

“... His first piece, for piano, was nine bars long, most of it a quote from a music-hall song called ‘Ma Normandie’. He seems to have found the sounds of the cafés and nightclubs more alluring than the classical tradition, and a ‘Fantaisie-Valse’ and a ‘Valse-Ballet’ followed.By the mid 1880s Satie was excelling at the vie de ...”

“... a passing resemblance to a small eastern deity, but even so it’s something of a lurch from this hall full of serene statuary, including the head of a 13th-century Buddha carved from sandstone, to a Scarfe cartoon of Harold Wilson with his lolling tongue in close proximity to Lyndon Johnson’s bottom (‘Vietnam: Wilson right behind Johnson’, 30 April ...”

“... Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all. But the next few years promise no end of Kipling. When copyright runs out, his work will be published extensively in paperback, and ...”