“... know more about the history of the 16th century than I know about anything else; I have spent the best years of my life in reading and writing about it.’ The Tudors were familiar, but they hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake ...”

“... Ezra Pound wrote in his 1930 essay ‘Small Magazines’, but Brooker and Thacker do their best to reconstruct them. One point of departure, in Britain at least, was the early 19th-century tradition of the quarterly review. The Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802), the Quarterly Review (1809), Blackwood’s (1817) and the Westminster Review ...”

“... Shakespeare? Didn’t you realise he was the Earl of Oxford? The other problem is that even the best examples can’t entirely avoid the naive reduction of literature to evidence or symptom – epiphenomena which are brought about by, and potentially reducible to, biographical origins. These generic pressures set up a conflict between literary biography and ...”

“... in the spring of 1533, presumably to prevent him from interrupting the divorce proceedings. What best characterises the man and the nature of his faith is his weeping for joy on hearing the prophecy of Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent, that if Henry were to marry Anne, he would not remain king for long. Once Fisher and More and a handful of public opponents ...”

“... to the Music of Time; and the memoirs, journals and journalism. Afternoon Men might not be the best of the early books, but on the other hand it might, and it’s certainly characteristic of the world and manner of the period – like Waugh’s Decline and Fall it has the attractive bloom of first-book freshness. It is told mainly in dialogue; it describes ...”

“... than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in the elaboration of the scenario: Taruskin redresses the balance by describing in detail Roerich’s contribution and four Russian sources he probably used for elaborating the ballet’s striking visual imagery. Stravinsky shaped events to make ...”

“... was in danger of falling out.’ In these matters Pym has an undoubted resemblance to Jane Austen. Nicholas Spice, in his perceptive review of Crampton Hodnet in these columns, pointed out that in many ways the Pym world is as black as hell, the vision of marriage or celibacy, work and play, equally scarifying. D.W. Harding and other academic critics have ...”

“... But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be guessed ...”

“... this lack of poise is a positive thing, part of Epstein’s style, but it seems probable that, at best, it will in the end be judged a provincialism, akin to Hogarth’s ramshackle perspective. Although Gardiner insists that Epstein was highly self-critical, his output was variable. Many of the portrait busts are very fine, others are botched. When he turned ...”

“... of Richter’s work at Tate Modern is a great event. It is beautifully hung by Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota: packed tight and relentless room after room, by the end exhausting, and in this entirely true to Richter’s half-century of effort. The selection of work could not be better, with things often seen before enlivened by juxtaposition with the ...”

“... But what about countries where the civil service barely functions, where the rule of law is at best an aspiration and leaders deploy real weapons against their own people as well as metaphorical ones? The deliverologists would say it is even more important to have clear targets and a separate machinery for achieving them when the rest of the government is ...”

“... every respect to the people is deeply ingrained. Our culture is still one of subjecthood, at its best paternal and at its worst authoritarian.’ This hostility to the way the Left (as well as the Right) has conventionally run its and the country’s affairs is also to be found in the essays on economic and social policy. Christopher Huhne, in a ...”

“... of the same coin is struck in The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 by two of its American contributors: Nicholas Thacher, a diplomatic veteran who was in the American Embassy in Baghdad from 1956 to 58, and Frederick Axelgard, a current State Department official, both of whom consider that in the Fifties the United States displayed altogether too much deference for ...”

“... the century. In this connection it is particularly important to note that it independence was the best solution for Ireland, then it was of vital importance for two unconnected reasons that it be achieved in the first third of this century. The first reason – again ex post facto – is that if independence had not been achieved by, say, 1930, there simply ...”

“... he pragmatically calculates he’s in an impossible corner and they’ll kill him if he stays. As Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese, says in his hideously informative Wiseguy,* the documentary book on which the film is based: ‘He willingly turned on the world he knew and the men with whom he had been raised with the same ...”