“... stirred. Kate Loveman’s new book traces the way Evelyn’s triumph prompted the master, George Neville, to consider whether he ought to do something about the 17th-century diary in his collection. He lent the first volume to an uncle, who passed it to another uncle, who advised Neville to find ‘some man for whom the lucre of gain will sacrifice a ...”

“... camera discredited their expression of piety otherwise displayed. (Frame Analysis) Sharper than George V, he spots a button undone: Young psychiatrists in state mental hospitals who are sympathetic to the plight of the patients sometimes express distance from their administrative medical role by affecting shirts open at the collar, much as do socialists in ...”

“... Shandy Hall inhabit a world of incompetently linked ideas – Toby’s obsession with war games, Walter’s doomed theories – in sporadic collision with unco-operative physical facts. Porter rightly says that the book keeps leading us back to ‘a body which never lets the mind forget its presence’. In general he sees the body and natural sentiment as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that his children’s English nanny, with whom he may have had an affair, was a spy sent by Lloyd George, and paced the family home brandishing a revolver. He committed himself to a hospital in Hamburg, before moving to a private clinic in Jena in 1920 and then to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, where other postwar burnouts included ...”

“... Quentin chapter of The Sound and the Fury) obscures the attempt at honest praise of the labour of George Gudger. Why did Agee fluff and pamper this conventional theme of the writer as criminal? The enigmatic figure of Edgar had somehow become for him an image of the suffering artist – the character possibly getting entangled with a memory of Lear’s speech ...”

“... This has allowed the steady growth in power of a class of insiders and experts, first described by Walter Lippmann during the Thirties, whose technical skill and organic affiliations with the power structure gradually insulated them from scrutiny and accountability. It is my impression that whereas the first clandestine operatives as well as their immediate ...”

“... and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently ...”

“... which had built up an artificial nature.’ (Another candidate for transformation – he reads Walter Pater – is not so lucky, being despatched by a Mad Mullah on page 140.) Kipling was less sanguine. His early stories show innocence broken rather than transformed, and Britain separated from the British in India by irreconcilable differences of ...”

“... and inventions we associate with the late 19th century, with Dostoevsky and James, George Eliot and Pontoppidan; those drew on the openings and possibilities of a competitive capitalism, in which robber barons and monopolies signified an expansion of individual and collective power. This American version, in the late 20th century, signifies ...”

“... He recognised us, but he couldn’t speak. Hugh was reading J.G. Lockhart’s Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott; a straw bookmark showed that he was halfway into Volume II. He had read Lockhart before: he had read all of Scott several times since he was a child. The lives of writers were one of his major preoccupations: this biography, written by Scott’s ...”

“... a sharp word for a daughter-in-law who serves cockroaches as a delicacy.’ He quotes a scene from Walter Scott’s The Antiquary, in which the old mendicant factotum Edie Ochiltree is given qualified access to a moment of celebration: ‘A table was quickly covered in the parlour, where the party sat joyously down to some refreshment. At the request of ...”

“... electorate (a requirement inserted into the legislation by a disgruntled Labour backbencher, George Cunningham, a Scot sitting for an English seat), the SNP’s appeal fizzled for the best part of a decade. What happened next, at least according to many of those who were involved, is that Scotland’s artists and writers stepped into the breach as the ...”

“... for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?’ is not just appropriate to a poem for children. It is a real question, just as this, from Stevie Smith, is real information: Cool and plain Cool and plain Was the message of love on the window ...”

“... Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State George Marshall predicted Jewish defeat. Without a secret Czech arms deal, Israel would probably not have survived. After fighting for a year, it had lost 1 per cent of its population. Yet the Nazi Holocaust did not become a focus of American Jewish life in ...”