“... voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco gay ‘look’ in his travel book States of Desire (1980). Bodies made themselves intelligible: A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of ...”

“... financial crisis which seems finally to have been solved by Lewis Golden, the accountant on the white horse who Wells sees as a figure as heroic as Carlyle in the annals of the Library. All the other large and small circulating and subscription libraries of the Victorian and Edwardian eras – Boot’s, Mudie’s and thousands of cornershop twopenny-loan ...”

“... the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been composed. It’s the time of the Art Wars (1990-93), and Tony Lowes, Philosopher, asserts that ‘to save the starving we must give up art.’ Wittgenstein, apparently, was of the same mind. That’s what it ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were ...”

“... volume makes a less coherent collection. There are sundry essays on Victorian historians and the Norman Yoke, on how 19th-century commentators looked to the future, and on how some historians play the same prediction game. And there are short and appreciative pieces on G.M. Trevelyan, G.M. Young and Gilberto Freyre, which tell us almost as much about Briggs ...”

“... Theory of Life – are all elucidated in this fine study. The literary rows about plagiarism, and Norman Fruman’s detective work on these, need never have happened. And the various pieces that passed comment on Fruman (one of them, also written by Christopher Ricks, was given the heading ‘The Moral Imbecility of a Would-Be Wunderkind’) Levere ...”

“... all her fears. And she removed the cause of them. Towards the end of the trial she appeared white and tired, but she did not waver in her composure or in the assertion of her innocence. Whether this was belle indifférence or simply the relief of having taken action at last would need the competence of quite a different court to decide. And yet she is ...”

“... of Secker’s series of regional anthologies. It is elegantly produced with half a dozen black and white illustrations of which the charming (c.1850) print of Ballantyne’s Close, Grass-market, over against Norman MacCaig’s poem, ‘Edinburgh Courtyard in July’, may be taken as typical, both in respect of quality and of ...”

“... of pride to him to this day, and was at the time a healthy source of rivalry between himself, Norman Mailer and James Jones. There is no reason for him not to try and have this both ways, like so much else. But that would mean noticing that he was trying to do so.In a way that is not perhaps quite dissimilar, Vidal returns again and again to his contempt ...”

“... An anointed king of England hadn’t taken one of his own subjects for a wife since before the Norman Conquest, so why did Edward? Certainly, he was ‘wild with desire’ for Woodville, as Penn notes, and ‘used to getting what he wanted’. Penn opts for an Anne Boleyn theory of events – in Woodville, Edward ‘met his match’. If he wanted to sleep ...”

“... ends, sooner or later. The logic of not knowing why we are in Vietnam, to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer, is that we shall scarcely know why we are anywhere, including home. Apocalypse Now Redux contains a whole miniature film within the film, twenty-five or so restored minutes, in which Willard’s group comes across an isolated French plantation, and ...”

“... technology. The Domesday Book was the first and BSE might be thought of as a tardy riposte to that Norman intrusion – the disease, after all, has crossed the Channel in the opposite direction. In any event, it is clear that the story Phillips tells is peculiarly English, to the point that some Scottish scientists, Welsh public health doctors and Northern ...”

“... that our old home had been knocked down. Not only knocked down, but replaced by a hideous piece of white-box modernism, with a poser’s narrow swimming pool and a triple-height atrium overlooking where the garden used to be. The punchline was that this new development was empty and abandoned too. I felt, of all unexpected things, a wave of relief. The only ...”

“... become ardent Nazis). But his career as a journalist began when he wangled a job as assistant to Norman Ebbutt, the Times correspondent in Berlin. Ebbutt and Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully ...”

“... East. In an observation which is on a par with his wife Midge Decter’s about Libya and the IRA, Norman Podhoretz complains about the ‘mindless bias’ of the press in favour of terrorists and Yasser Arafat. In fact, as everybody except Mr and Mrs Podhoretz knows, the American press has been biased in favour of Zionism. Discussion of Middle Eastern ...”