“... aristocracy, his contempt for all other classes, and his pleasure in reaction. But then, so John Bayley observed, they move an amendment. In order to explain these aberrations, they explain that Waugh was a disillusioned romantic. Graham Greene wrote that ‘he is a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him’: his first marriage, the ...”

“... proffered solutions of two apparently very different kinds. One, advanced by Lord Woolf and Sir John Laws, is based on a fresh paradigm of constitutional law – fresh at least in this country, though familiar elsewhere. It looks beyond the Diceyan datum line of a supreme and unchallengeable Parliament and asks where a Parliament derives its authority to ...”

“... his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress. Why, then, has John Keane chosen as the subtitle of his biography ‘A Political Tragedy in Six Acts’? In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he organised the publication ...”

“... flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the original – might well ...”

“... This​ book is a departure from John Carey’s normal mode, much more intently introductory than anything else he has written in a long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and hospitalisation’) or indeed with other sorts of knowledge that might be thought fairly general (‘Totalitarian regimes seek to control every aspect of life, including writing ...”

“... Before​ Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’. On the fourth day of the new administration, Rachel Reeves gave a speech outlining the ways she planned to ‘fix the foundations of our economy ...”

“... does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and his marriage to Rita Hayworth; complicated relationships, usually rounded up to some sort of friendship, with the great producers of the day who used ...”

“... Our ancestors, faithful to God and Mary, once held this whole island before the foreign heretic took it from us.’ And they will have it back again come what may. The long-awaited Framework Document for a new Northern Ireland states that die Republic intends renouncing its constitutional claim on the whole island, in order to encourage a settlement. ‘As ...”

“... everything short of pre-paid order forms. The illuminati have been smuggled into the Index: John Wilkinson, Peter Riley, Drew Milne, Rod Mengham and (of course) J.H. Prynne himself. Prynne and Zappa? Certainly, why not? Ben Watson (the footnotes): ‘When I asked Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like ...”

“... his school, Pearse was executed by the British for leading another rebellion. The Kiernan sisters took a bit of the creative atmosphere of St Ita’s back to Granard on their return. By the time Collins came to stay, they were helping Larry to run the family’s concerns with bohemian zest and flair. They had their clothes designed by a cousin (another ...”

“... aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of us were in blue jeans and leather jackets and up to no good in the Village, but Robert always had an impeccable blazer, very Old Etonian, consciously so. I ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him profoundly: Trevelyan by urging the links between ...”

“... English Woman’s Journal in 1858, establishing an employment register for women, agitating with John Stuart Mill for divorce and married women’s property reform, and helping to found Girton College, Cambridge. Barbara both illustrated in her own life and commented on the ironic complexities of women’s status. As Sheila Herstein points out (in a rare ...”

“... figure. A belief in his national importance led to his refusal in 1794 to visit his radical friend John Thelwall – when Thelwall was in Newgate charged with treason – on the grounds that Godwin must not jeopardise his own life, ‘this treasure which does not belong to me but to the public’. It is hard not to be reminded of the passage Jane Austen had ...”