“... Gardens to some daring private high-rises, which were very unusual until the 21st century. The best development, as is so often the case, was the first, the Dulwich Wood Park Estate, with its small houses and eight-storey tower blocks, beautifully detailed with coloured panels, enormous windows and concrete pergolas. This was mildly experimental for ...”

“... that while also cautioning readers about the teleological nature of Tawney’s historical work: as Geoffrey Elton charged, he came up ‘with the answers required by the faith that inspired the search’. I’m not sure those warnings are necessary: serious students of history no longer read Tawney as a guide to the 17th century. Nor is the binary Goldman sets ...”

“... superb bardic flourish that is both neoclassical, partly in a Swinburnian mode, and Whitmanesque: Best of all is my voice from the springing south: brilliant, particular leaves come rioting out of my mouth. It is the terrain of (on the safer side) Kathleen Raine and (on the dangerous edge) of Sylvia Plath. But to stay there too long risks stasis or ...”

“... he confesses to having ‘not the slightest doubt’: ‘In a perfect world, I would choose ... Geoffrey Howe.’ There must be more to the Hailsham connection than that. And here we glimpse in a single cameo both Junor’s saving unpredictability and the thraldom which, as editor, he could exercise. The time is 1963, the moment the fight for the succession ...”

“... Tales: they are printed the way they are because someone, after Chaucer’s death, had to make the best he could of what he had. Yet though everyone knows this, in a sort of a way, their profession makes critics dig order and unity out of somewhere: ‘Most studies of the Tales,’ Pearsall writes in an uncompromising footnote, ‘use one or other of the ...”

“... alternative to Sikorsky, they agreed, should be put together, and the Government should do its best to encourage it. Heseltine was out of the country in early November, but when he returned he set his mind to the task. On 26 November, he met Sir John Cuckney, who from the outset was anxious to proceed with the Sikorsky take-over, and told him he was ...”

“... technology, however, it can often make up by espionage. Even comparatively low-level spies like Geoffrey Prime in Britain and the Walker family in the United States are sometimes able to provide priceless technical intelligence. There is recent evidence that from 1976 to 1983 the KGB was able to read France’s diplomatic traffic with its Moscow embassy by ...”

“... success, the marriage itself was a failure. The couple lived apart and their union was ‘at best a marriage that petered out’, though we don’t know why. Critics more speculative than Turner have made much of the most disturbing life record: a legal document which shows that in 1380 Cecily Champaigne released ...”

“... youth, and a tragic precursor for the other three young officers she loved – Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow and her younger brother, Edward, all killed in action. When one reads Brittain’s diary, it is hard not to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness and superior ...”

“... that the reign of radicalism would thereby be instituted, a further upset lay in store. For the best part of twenty years, the Conservatives established a grip on power which was only broken in 1906. Radicals claimed that the electoral system was still hopelessly biased towards the propertied classes, and some historians have subsequently argued that such ...”

“... were ‘political’: ‘Diana – the only jewel in the crown’; ‘Charles, you’ve lost the best thing you ever had. Good luck to Wills and Harry,’ said one poster stuck to the railings of Buckingham Palace. As many people noted, the whole atmosphere was very ‘democratic’: rarely can the railings of our royal palaces have been treated with such ...”

“... with Macmillan. It is nice to be reminded of the Supermac style. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan ...”

“... Farm and Point du Jour, the French infantry at St Privat had turned their chassepots – then the best infantry rifles in the world – on the thick columns of Prussian guards spreading out across the fields below and pushing up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened ...”

“... sensational interest to the prim but prurient 1950s newspaper-reading public. The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer had observed in his 1951 survey of British people that ‘though most English men and women cannot “let themselves go”, they love to think and read about people who do throw off inhibitions, either with sex or violence.’ The hunt was on to ...”

“... them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series of ...”