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“... the border the old Roman road – now the A140 – which heads north from Ipswich towards Norwich. James Bettley, who has already revised Essex, is responsible for the expansion. The Buildings of England series has left Penguin for Yale University Press, who have both overseen the third edition of the series and continued with the new volumes of Buildings of ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”

“... attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla feel ‘as if all the air in the world is filled with fireworks, and all the stars in the heavens are falling to earth – a thing truly stupendous, and marvellous to behold’. Reformation and ...”

“... there is no difficulty, as Thompson points out, in reinterpreting it as a Downton Abbey affair. James Fox’s articles in the Sunday Times and the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to ...”

“... stand by and pretend that she didn’t care, not just for her own sake, but for mine. Her husband, Peter, was well liked by the hardnut, Rangers Club toughs and, if our affair was ever discovered, she knew exactly what would happen to us both – especially to me. Still, whatever the emotion was that I had seen in her face, it quickly melted away as she nodded ...”

“... is dark and slippery and began by turning the former hero, Jim Phelps, long and suavely played by Peter Graves, into a faintly smiling villain played by Jon Voight. This did not go down well with everyone. Martin Landau, who was the master of disguise in the television series, said the original show ‘was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and ...”

“... Kubrick’s Lolita, handsomely set up by the director and beautifully spun out by the actor. Peter Sellers, as the creepy and protean Clare Quilty, has struck up a conversation with James Mason, as Humbert Humbert. The latter is in no mood for any kind of conversation, since he is just marking time before he returns to ...”

“... which it held for him. His relations with the Lobby ranged from love affair to stormy divorce. James Callaghan lacked Wilson’s flair as a political news editor but took a self-conscious pride in his acquired mastery of the trade’s little tricks. ‘You know the difference between leaking and briefing,’ he told a colleague. ‘Leaking is what you ...”

“... readers would never have accepted them, as they did, as being completely convincing. Henry James, who admired the bogusness of his brilliant young friend, had long since spotted the paradox involved, and often comically sighed over it. It made him distrust biography as well as the graphic sort of fiction, and by implication relate the two. He embarked ...”

“... seize on any pairings that offered themselves (‘his antagonisms and his ingratiations’ – of James Kelman; ‘drugs … poured their balm, but embalmed him’ – of Robert Lowell; ‘Emmas, Cockburn and Rothschild’ – a Listener cover line; ‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – an LRB cover line), was always there but became more pronounced ...”

“... vetting, a successor who would embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he ...”

“... He will open a review, as if telling the boys, ‘Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903,’ ‘Alice James, born 1848, was the only sister of Henry James.’ And these decent and helpful conventions (now hopelessly out of date – a startling number of the intelligent young now know no history at all) will sometimes ...”

“... the adult narrator’s ability to interpret the nature of that knowing to the reader. Henry James offers a master-class in point-of-view in his preface to the novel: I should have of course to suppose for my heroine dispositions originally promising, but above all I should have to invest her with perceptions easily and almost infinitely quickened. So ...”

“... was no more representative ‘Saturday Reviler’ than Leslie Stephen’s older brother, James Fitzjames Stephen. Born in 1829, son of the distinguished public official Sir James Stephen (whose grip on policy was so tight that while heading the Colonial Office he was known as ‘Mr Over-Secretary ...”

“... as he is to enjoy; he did not want scholars to puzzle for a lifetime over his meaning and thought James Joyce, who did, ‘dotty’. So there are no revelations as to what he is saying, just an examination of how he says it. Nor did Waugh quite start at random and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when ...”