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“... aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton. Yet he appeals equally to defenders and opponents of the canon. Chatterton was convinced of his own talent and ambitious to be recognised as one of the great English poets; but he chose to attract public attention with pastiche ...”

“... perhaps only his wilful inaccessibility can explain it,’ or: ‘And it was strange – as Collins and Enderby privily agreed – how everything that Smiley said seemed to pass through the room like a chill; how in some way that they failed to understand, they had removed themselves to a higher order of human conduct for which they were unfit.’ Such ...”

“... of characters but the central figure, and one of the few still alive at the end, is 12-year-old Peter, who the author readily admitted was a self-portrait, not least in his reluctance to be a Hitler Youth. The family home is a large estate, the Georgenhof, once affluent, less so since the war began, its vistas somewhat spoiled by the housing development ...”

“... Museum and the Natural History Museum), his diaries remain in England. They were seen by Michael Collins and Eamon Duggan during the 1921 Treaty negotiations. In the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know Casement’s ...”

“... wonder. Poems, then, may grow out of aphorisms; they may also sink into aphorisms, as when Churton Collins scribbles on some famous lines of Milton: ‘We are no more responsible for evil thoughts which pass through our minds, than a scarecrow for the birds which fly over the seed-plot he has to guard; the sole responsibility in each case is to prevent them ...”

“... Surrealism’, ‘Guernica’ (in 1937 Picasso’s latest) and ‘Cross-shaft at Codford St Peter, Wiltshire. Early ninth century (photos John Piper)’. ‘Of course we were as poor as church mice,’ Piper assured me once, with Myfanwy nodding agreement. Poor but busy, they were flush enough to buy a secondhand Lancia and roam the country seeking ...”

“... highlighted in numerous pessimistic analyses, including Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy (2000) and Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (2013). Trade union membership in the UK peaked at more than 50 per cent of the workforce in 1979, but has since declined to just 23 per cent. The mantra of ‘choice’ and ‘competition’ in public services, which was central to ...”

“... stage Scotsmen, impersonating themselves, and about why MacDiarmid hated Harry Lauder. Maybe Merle Collins’s poem about a popular soup, ‘Callaloo’, avoids such worries better, coming with balletic line-breaks out of an oral tradition, a home that nurtures but does not imprison: Mix up like callaloo Not no watery callaloo But a thick, hot, sweet callaloo ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... new areas. He died before he could finish the book, but the revision was more or less complete. Peter Burton and Richard Smith have added chapters on film, the gay scene and rock music, for which Baker had left notes. The result is not just about drag, nor yet about female impersonation, and doesn’t even confine itself to the performing arts. Besides the ...”

“... the dominant figure within Sinn Féin – ‘the most important Irish Republican since Michael Collins’, as Sharrock and Devenport put it – his character, history and intentions are crucially important. What we need to know is what the authors ask in their title: is he a peacemaker or a warmonger? Gerry Adams was born in West Belfast in October ...”

“... to have the cool exactitude of his father’s studies of the private lives of sea anemones. Peter Abbs’s introduction to the current Penguin edition, first published in 1983, accepts the memoir as a faithful record of what happened: ‘As a documentary record we know, from other sources, that most of the facts are accurate.’ This is very much the ...”

“... English Charlemagne?’, can be usefully juxtaposed with the papers of Wormald and Peter Sawyer). The book ends, fittingly, with Eric John’s evocation of the world of Abbot Aelfric, a scholar of the late Anglo-Saxon era. Fittingly, because that world already contained the seeds of its own dissolution, in the shape of the new ideas about how ...”

“... weren’t interested in ‘causes’. But Hecht has found his cause. His introduction came via Peter Bergson, the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, who had come to America from Lithuania by way of Palestine. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, Kook formed a series of organisations to continue his work, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and ...”

“... at that, now,’ her mother, a perfume magnate whose Protestant husband died nastily for Michael Collins, says of a cup of tea: ‘Strong enough to trot a mouse on.’ He amuses himself, also, by playing up the hero’s drink problem – Marlowe has to be helped into a taxi, passes out in his clothes, throws up – and having him grouse about his physical ...”