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“... new publications from the States: Mailer, His Life and Times, by (that means ‘transcribed by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and ...”

“... to undervalue Britain’s musical heritage. Among the members of his own circle, composers such as Peter Warlock, Alan Rawsthorne, Berners, even to some extent Walton have faded well beyond their worth. Lloyd plainly considers Lambert a significant composer, but he doesn’t argue the case in any very material or persuasive way, and he hardly even attempts to ...”

“... likely to have – and Murdoch has done his bit in furthering it. He and Robert Stigwood financed Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981), which stands in this tradition. A ‘radical’ rhetoric armed Murdoch for his invasion of the United States. In what McKnight calls a ‘deep political transformation’, America and a neoconservative view of the country ...”

“... within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any ...”

“... so for readers wanting a reliable guide to Euripides’ sense fifty years later, just as the thin brown Penguins by E.F. Watling were already dead and indigestible when I was told to read them at school. But Horace is a very special case. For a start, what he said and how he said it really matters, tremendously. David West quite rightly begins the ...”

“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”

“... ornamentally in service to academic publication and career trajectories’. David Sterling Brown’s essay on Shakespeare’s near obsession with white women’s white hands doesn’t bring in his own lived experience, but his monograph Shakespeare’s White Others – in which Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello are used as case ...”

“... knowing even the most elementary facts about the intelligence services their taxes pay for. The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither ...”

“... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir ...”

“... the Longman’s pages on Victorian constructions of gender allow masculinity equal time: Tom Brown as well as Queen Victoria, Charles Kingsley as well as Harriet Martineau. And for all their apparent political correctness, the editors are rarely squeamish about incorporating texts whose politics are likely to trouble students. While the Norton’s new ...”

“... to decide on any one standard and stick to it. The editors are not keen on the line put forward by Peter Townshend, of 140 per cent of the supplementary benefit level, because it would leave over one and a half million people receiving less than half the average wage. An even stronger objection is that every time a generous government raises the supplementary ...”

“... with life-saving equipment on the wall in case it failed to get you there in time; the ghastly brown autumnal prints on the corridor walls hinting too readily at ‘September Song’ (‘the days dwindle down to a precious few’); and even, in a distant way, the other patients. We hardly spoke to one another, but only nodded our heads, because people in ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”

“... court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the Fieldings’ house and across the road from the Brown Bear, which became, as Beattie puts it, ‘a lock-up as well as a hang-out’ for the runners. They were expected to be ready to act at very short notice and most of them lived very near the court in the streets around Covent Garden, but hung out, when on ...”

“... recent French presidential election rubbed the point in painfully; as has the elevation of Gordon Brown on this side of the Channel. Neither Roberto Unger nor Jacques Attali undervalues the achievements of social democracy, or indeed of state socialism. But both suggest that in either case any reprise or development now depends on finding a different ...”