“... as a negative quota allocation, strictly minority, coming out of Africa, via Port au Prince, to Christopher Street. The WHO goes to Kikwit without any claims to a mercy mission; there’s no humiliation for local health personnel. This is not Ethiopia 1974 or 1984-5; there’s no famine, no genocide, no celebrities, no good works to be done: the issue is ...”

“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... statesmen, like others, did not know what they were doing.’ Something similar is argued by Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, a book whose title says it all. I don’t think this is just an academic spat, a Historikerstreit, with little application to modern political debate. On the contrary, I think it has had a damaging knock-on effect on our ...”

“... Byron was its first and finest creation. His wife and daughter could not escape fame, they could hope only to avoid notoriety. Annabella’s attempts to preserve her reputation and other people’s attempts to salvage Byron’s have left a pall of smoke from burning letters and diaries, further obscuring the facts that remain. Seymour carries off a delicate ...”

“... the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the ...”

“... rich material would inevitably make its way into his fiction. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Jean-Christopher Cloutier unexpectedly came across another novel that had been buried in the archives. Amiable with Big Teeth was written in 1941 but has only now been published for the first time, with an introduction by Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards.* It was the ...”

“... Dirks does a first-rate job of summarising the debate between English historians of India, such as Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook, who downplay the corrupting nature of empire by assigning a good deal of the blame to Indian ‘agents and accomplices’, and a substantial number of post-colonial Indian and non-Indian historians who hold the Empire ...”

“... Oxford doctor Humphrey Havard, and a Dominican priest, Gervase Mathew. Tolkien inducted his son Christopher, later a lecturer in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English at Oxford, and the editor of his father’s copious Nachlass. His enduring achievement was to draw the maps for The Lord of the Rings. Then there was the ever present ‘Warnie’ – Lewis’s ...”

“... which Nixon railed and to which Kissinger reported. Today, the only way the Republicans can hope to win the coming presidential election is by promising not coexistence but perpetual conflict. It is hard to reconcile Dallek’s Kissinger – jealous, sycophantic, duplicitous and striving – with the one in Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the ...”

“... as the vast clouds of passenger pigeons that once darkened the skies of America; one can only hope some institution of the future will be able to preserve a relic or two in honour of it, as the Smithsonian now preserves the stuffed remains of Martha. Should the Sterne defence seem unconvincing, however, the modern poet can always fall back on the notion ...”

“... wake of the great debate of the 1940s and 1950s that was dominated by R.H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill and Trevor-Roper himself. Its focus was the economic causes of the war. The conflicting hypotheses about the wealth and power of the aristocracy and gentry, about the waning of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and about the relationship ...”

“... are, not what you pretend to be. You, Wystan, will find him very soon, within three months. You, Christopher, will have to wait much longer for yours ... At present he is only four years old.If looking for Mr Right was what it was, this celebrated voyage that put paid to a decade, it was lucky that Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the ...”

“... eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago’.In America, he met the young journalist Hope Hale. Like all the women Cockburn was involved with, she was hotly radical and stubbornly self-reliant. They had to be: he moved with ease from job to job and woman to woman. According to Patrick Cockburn, Hale was fascinated ‘by Claud’s blend of ...”

“... retranslations of the same old texts – which is not self-evidently a good thing – we might hope that at least some of them would be done by classicists who are younger, or less white, or less male.Of course, it is quite easy for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired old vision of the same old texts. More ...”

“... right hand. It is a kind of ritual, a purging of the past, the key representing the last physical hope of ever returning to the land that was Palestine and is now Israel. ‘Your Uncle George locked the front door,’ she said. ‘You see, we thought we would only be leaving for fourteen or fifteen days, until the fighting died down. So we took a few clothes ...”