“... Bagshaw, a shabby but not disagreeable literary operator, who brings out some of Powell’s best comic writing. Bagshaw has been taken as a representation of Malcolm Muggeridge, a connection which Powell, in his Journals, first denies then half accepts. Well, perhaps he just denies intending it. ‘This too never intended,’ he notes – the other ...”

“... pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is doing when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter looking at cosmetics. ‘And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of ...”

“... blur of his mufti. ‘Are you filming?’ he said. ‘Filming what?’ said the cameraman, James Nicholas. The priest said: ‘Please don’t show this family.’ James reached along the stock of the camera and flicked a switch. Trimming what you film has become second nature in the province. Camera crews do not favour the faces of RUC officers; the cabbies ...”

“... kind, its sum is not greater than its component parts, which vary widely in quality. Perhaps the best essay – J.G.A. Pocock’s – is also one of the few which attempt to define radicalism. It reassesses WASP political ideologues between 1688 and 1776 and admits some oppositional Tories and some capitalists to a share in virtu. Christopher Hill supplies ...”

“... Street tremble), but the length – almost twelve hours. This was an attempt (as was the RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby) to dramatise the whole of a serious book and never mind how long it takes. The distillation and elision that have always been the main concern of adapters suddenly seem out-dated. Harold Pinter’s reduction of Remembrance of Things Past to 163 ...”

“... Amidst a grief-stricken population Solzhenitsyn wanted to jump for joy. Much as the death of Nicholas I ultimately made the suspension of Dostoevsky’s permanent exile possible, so now events were set in train that would lead to the rise of Khrushchev, de-Stalinisation and Solzhenitsyn’s own rehabilitation. Before this could happen, however, it seemed ...”

“... As Patrick explains to his friend Johnny Hall, ‘I happen to think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since … well, since my father’s death.’ This gruesome story is no doubt given much of its power by the fact that Patrick and his family are portraits from life – ‘uninvented’, as St Aubyn has said. The author was raped by ...”

“... down to us in nine musical sources and sixteen text manuscripts – an exceptional number and the best proof of the collaborative nature of composition in the period. It was expected that the text of a planctus would be imbued with intense personal emotion, which would make this corpus, if it were better known, easily the rival of the mannerist texts of the ...”

“... how the story of his play, Orvet, was inspired by his survival in a car crash which killed his best friend; and in 1963 he tells a New York Times journalist that the idea for La Grande Illusion came to him when, while shooting Toni, he crossed paths with a pilot who had saved his life many years earlier. Both in the letters and in Ma vie et mes films we ...”

“... from pre-Presidential days.’ They included Cecil Spring Rice, an Englishman who had served as best man at his wedding and had been in the British Embassies at Berlin, Constantinople and St Petersburg, and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory MP. According to Morris, ‘their urbane, literate reports’ kept Roosevelt up to date ‘with court affairs and privileged ...”

“... did much more than either Souter or Gloag for Stagecoach. Margaret Thatcher and her eager disciple Nicholas Ridley privatised the National Bus Company in 1985. The ‘thinking’ behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the publicly-owned National Bus Company was a vast ...”

“... religious orders. He was one of the most admired dons of his generation and, for McFarlane, the best evidence of Wyclif’s eminence is that it was almost universally acknowledged, even by his enemies. Even Archbishop Arundel conceded that he was ‘a great clerk’. Evans tells us as much and more about the study and pursuit of logic, philosophy and ...”

“... and champion of the equally un-Sacheverellite causes of Whiggism and politeness. However, those best acquainted with the adult Sacheverell remarked on his angularity and chilly pomposity. This unattractive character nevertheless became the darling of a Tory public which responded enthusiastically to his audacious preaching and swooned at his pose of willing ...”

“... on the existence, or at least the appearance, of German espionage, yet despite his bureau’s best efforts, it was unable to locate a single German spy during its first two years of operations. This did not stop MI5 securing several prosecutions. In September 1910, Siegfried Helm, a German national, was arrested on suspicion of espionage. MI5 had never ...”

“... at psychoanalysis, or to unlock Elizabeth’s bedchamber. From the beginning Elizabeth did her best to resist scrutiny, protecting her privacy as best she could. She wrote as a teenager in about 1548: ‘It is … rather characteristic of my nature not only not to say in words as much as I think in my mind, but ...”