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“... held mine in place. I said: it’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’ There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the ...”

“... slavery a century and a half after it supposedly ended? These are difficult questions that are not best dealt with in tart formulas about self-inflicted wounds and imperialism being ‘over’. Indian and British, Indochinese and French, American and Native American: the histories are interdependent. Consider Britain’s savage war against ...”

“... two Balkan Wars virtually ended Ottoman power in Europe. It is true that Enver Pasha, perhaps the best-known of the new elite, won huge prestige when he held the city of Edirne for the Empire (Enver Hoxha and Anwar Sadat were two of the thousands of babies to be named after the hero of the hour), but this was small compensation for losing ...”

“... holding in a ‘401(k)’ plan, the most popular savings vehicle in the US, is only $20,000. The best secondary pensions are still DB schemes, and these remain quite common in the public sector, where they enjoy an ultimate government guarantee, making them much more secure than the company-sponsored alternatives. Whether in the public or private sector, DB ...”

“... to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the ...”

“... been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years were 1927 (when the ...”

“... susceptibility. Such fusions of impulse and diagnosis are the hallmark of Lewis’s writing at its best. They also got him into a lot of trouble. Paul O’Keeffe’s new Life of Lewis does not hold back on the toe-jam. Some Sort of Genius is, among other things, a compendium of the many reasons people found to dislike its subject. Lewis became, sometimes by ...”

“... the mainly black servants once lived. The town has its own architectural hero, an Irishman called Nicholas Clayton, who designed a number of vigorous polychrome brick buildings in a medley of late Victorian styles. Ellen is deeply attuned to her subject, and has a particular appreciation of the simple geometry of the more modest houses, which have their own ...”

“... with an admiring and affectionate account of the city, the only part of the poem allowed by Tsar Nicholas I to be published in Pushkin’s lifetime. But a hint of menace is present in the opening lines: On a shore washed by the desolate waves, he stood, Full of high thoughts, and gazed into the distance. The monumental anonymous ‘he’ suggests both ...”

“... by the depressive’. A similar loss of identity occurred when he visited Paris with the artist Nicholas Garland, and again in Segovia. Barbara, his future wife of six decades, had stayed at home. Meanwhile, he was working like a pit-horse. ‘My life,’ he writes, ‘was filled with activities that, separately, would have lasted anyone else a ...”

“... the royal couple concentrated on minimising their exposure to political risk. Ridley does her best to show that George wasn’t just a ‘cipher sovereign’. At critical junctures, he could insist on his understanding of constitutional norms, and was encouraged by his secretary Arthur Bigge to think of himself as a neutral facilitator of consensus. He ...”

“... among his menaces of damnation’. Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape in the godly ...”

“... friend. He has never completely kicked the Grub/Fleet Street habit and is probably best known to American audiences for his essays on literary and other topics in upmarket periodicals. In the UK, and to some extent in Australia, however, his name evokes fame of a larger kind, and is strongly linked to television. Between 1972 and 1982, his TV ...”

“... was turning into something of an industry, with an indiscriminate appetite for fact and rumour. Nicholas Rowe’s life, appended to his 1709 edition of the plays, was based partly on information gleaned by the actor Thomas Betterton from descendants of people who might have gossiped or drunk with Shakespeare. Rowe established many of the paradigms for later ...”

“... in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an outsider, courteous yet aloof and observant. The son of a Lichfield sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and ...”