“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... remained firmly committed to the Westernisation that had created it. Even during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) – an arch-counterrevolutionary – the embrace of narodnost (sometimes translated as ‘nationality’ but meaning something like ‘being of the people’) remained relatively superficial. It was the Slavophiles, a group of Herder-inspired ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as Austen herself did, when we know that the effect on other people is most often negligible at best and at worst deleterious, has never gone away. The correct answer today is that we dress for ourselves, but that isn’t quite true either. We dress to say something about ourselves and the question is: to whom are the remarks addressed? They can be, indeed ...”

“... some of this quality from its being made so by its participants, who were, after all, some of the best writers of the period. It may not be easy to gauge the documents of an age that invented such brilliant documentaries, and whose novelists pretended to be a Camera.Take one of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage ...”

“... only talking about myself. In any case, with the whole topic so charged and so difficult, it is best to begin with the agreed facts. The climate of our planet is not stable. The whole of recorded human history has taken place within what is, from the earth’s point of view, a relatively narrow band of temperature. From a glaciological perspective, we are ...”

“... And by doing so, these critics proved it was so. They wrote as if Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray et al were as sophisticated and as consistent in their styles, worldviews, personal ‘signatures’ as, say, William Faulkner – and thanks to Cahiers, few cinephiles would today think of disputing that. They were, however, less successful in their ...”

“... the happiest of his relationships with a major director, though he did remarkable work for Nicholas Ray (Born to Be Bad, On Dangerous Ground), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night) and Jean Renoir (The Woman on the Beach). Lieutenant Benson is fighting in Korea because he has to, and the progress of his platoon is by inches, through a mined road and enemy ...”

“... Sir​ Nicholas Henderson was British ambassador almost everywhere that mattered – Bonn, Paris, Washington. He met all the great personalities of the second half of the 20th century. Yet in conversation he reverted, time and again, to the few years he spent in his twenties as assistant private secretary to Ernest Bevin ...”