“... German Nazi, an Egyptian Bedouin, a born ruler’) is tracked by a dogged Englishman, a low-caste major from a working-class background. A beautiful Jewess allies herself with the Englishman and risks her life and her virtue for the cause. Abducted into the desert, it is she who destroys Wolff. At the end of the novel girl and spy-catcher marry. These ...”

“... as they will – they find themselves in the happy position of not having to cope with a major predator. This little tale about the consequences of ignoring systemic interconnectedness – what Henry Kissinger used to call ‘linkage’ – is laughably simple. Yet it is acted out every year in countless vegetable plots and allotments all over the ...”

“... for its ‘gentleness and refinement’. On the other hand, the fact that so many portraits by John Opie ‘are thoroughly dull, if not frankly bad’, was owed to the fact that as the son of a carpenter ‘he had no elegance in his make-up, but was commissioned to do portraits of fashionable persons.’ Remarkable for its range as Waterhouse’s book ...”

“... he seems to be the only figure guided by a sense of history. The Euro-ideals of Kohl, Mitterrand, Major and the rest are based on the presumption that it is more polite to behave as if the past had never happened: the Third Reich, the Pétain regime in France and the near-anarchy which followed it; the forty years when Spain kowtowed to the Generalisimo; the ...”

“... an essayist and a poet, [who] has won many library prizes, and is professor of English at a major university in Brooklyn’. She has a husband and two children, and has lived in New York since completing her PhD at the University of Chicago. Iris Otway, the heroine of The Injured Party, has (with the exception of the ‘...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... which to fashion it lie ready to hand with the completion of the text of the Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Now that we have Volumes XI and XII, dealing with his more technical activities as an economist, only the index volume remains to be published, as the coping stone of a notable editorial enterprise. It is very gratifying that Sir Austin ...”

“... it’s the old story in nice new Faber covers. In essence, Peters aims to do for the life what John Carey did for the works with his applauded Thackeray, Prodigal Genius (1977): that is to say: re-tread familiar ground with brisk, commonsensical illumination. This she does well. Thackeray’s Universe is attractively written and profits the reader with a ...”

“... to believe that the British Government is the embodiment of saintliness and forbearance to place a major question-mark against this kind of analysis. Its fundamental flaw is that it has no place in its theology for the Protestant Unionist population of Northern Ireland. The extreme wing of Provisionalism does not even bother to profess concern for them, and ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... Tall, silver-haired and bearded, with a mesmerising voice and beguiling manner of delivery, John Pocock has long struck me as the Gandalf of the historical profession. The range, altitude and stylistic sophistication of his writing seem almost other-worldly, though legend has it that his distinctive accent derives from a small community of Channel Islanders in New Zealand ...”

“... closely-related questions. How did this small island, so sparsely-populated in comparison with its major rivals, manage to become the prime European and imperial power? And how was it able to remain fundamentally cohesive while it did so? Other polities succumbed to successful invasions from without or to major convulsions ...”

“... faith. Now, the edifice is crumbling, for while its sacred rites are still practised – from the major (public school and Oxbridge) to the minor (tailored suits and ordering the right wine) – slowly and unsurely the profession is admitting those from backgrounds other than the strictly upper middle class. The new entrants, it must be said, have continued ...”

“... for a second before attempting an officer’s name when relating how Dr Lowndes ‘ran away with Major – Major Van Dyce’s lady that year’. That Kipling was well aware of the dangers of his own virtuosity in this direction is shown, I think, by ‘The Finest Story in the World’, which can be read either as a ...”