“... be a shot in the arm. To the Americans, resolving the fate of the MIAs is also a form of therapy. George Bush announced that the Vietnam Syndrome had been kicked after Operation Desert Storm, but as Christopher Hitchens noted here in August, controversy over draft-dodging in the Presidential election campaign indicates that it was merely in remission. The ...”

“... his bowels were the subjects of countless agonised (and, for the robust William, trying) letters. Michael Anesko’s archivally heroic and at times scandalmongering book traces the way the legendary Master took hold of the public imagination while stifling the real James. Monopolising the Master opens with James’s own efforts to determine his posthumous ...”

“... 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 tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German ...”

“... was a hazardous business, and the prospect of losing your teeth for wooden dentures – like George Washington – was not a pleasing prospect. But narcotics lurk everywhere in the literature and experience of the 19th century, and not necessarily as a special ally of Romanticism. Opium stopped children crying, as well as providing a metaphysical escape ...”

“... adding-machine, rotary stencil./Give me another/double whiskey and fire extinguisher,/George. Here’s/Girls! Girls!’), Bunting as an ageing madam in ‘The Well of Lycopolis’. Language becomes the sum of its possibilities. Bunting extended Pound’s writ to Persian and the Queen’s English. To me, it’s a virtuous and a mutually reinforcing ...”

“... Earl of Somerset, was being supplanted as James I’s latest most beloved delegate on earth by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. For a playwright working under such regimes, picturing ideal monarchs might be a far safer option than depicting the ways in which the affairs of state were really being conducted. This is certainly suggested by the experience ...”

“... manager during Adams’s time at Arsenal – excluding for the moment Arsène Wenger – was George Graham. Graham looms very large indeed in Adams’s account. He undoubtedly admired Graham as manager; he thought him tough and a pro. He, like Adams, knew Arsenal’s limitations and successfully exploited its strengths. He appears as manager in Adams’s ...”

“... Even for Gladstone’s Liberal colleagues (though not for him), and for Elizabeth I or Lloyd George, they were a costly and debilitating diversion from more important matters. But except in the late 18th century, Ireland denied its administrators, even full-time, well-meaning ones, the illusion that overrule would be acceptable if only it provided ...”

“... was one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ...”

“... to talk, to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would stop me and my other brother, George, from speaking. We all knew what he was supposed to say, but if Richard was ever going to learn, we had to stay silent. The brains of mother and child aren’t separate. If he wanted it, he would have to say so. She would incline her head, lean over and ...”

“... than in his determination to build an alternative secular society. It was his predecessor George Jacob Holyoake who coined the term ‘secularism’ – ‘the province of the real, the known, the useful and the affirmative’ – in the year of the Great Exhibition, and it was not the least of the achievements of the age. But it was Bradlaugh ...”

“... most memorable lines. ‘It Dread Inna Inglan’ (1978) was written in response to the framing of George Lindo, a Black man jailed for burglary by an all-white jury in Bradford, despite three white colleagues giving clear evidence supporting his innocence. Johnson delivered the poem through a megaphone at a protest outside Bradford police station. (The song ...”

“... our own Royal Family is concerned: I seem to remember him citing as a fine example of a royal joke George V’s habitual greeting to Chula when he went to luncheon at Buckingham Palace: ‘How’s your uncle Damrong? I always tell him he’ll never be any good until he’s damn right.’ He has some curious and disturbing accomplishments. On the rare occasions ...”

“... seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to ...”

“... Fielding shows limited interest in the political process. He makes no reference, for example, to Michael Steed’s devastating analysis of the NF vote (Parliamentary Affairs, Summer 1978) or to other worthwhile writing by political scientists such as Layton-Henry or Taylor, and although he has added references to events in 1979 and even 1980, he has not ...”