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“... that emerged from it? The editing of these letters, under the careful eyes of Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate, is as superbly well done as it was in the first volume. This is not to say that the letters are great letters. Alas, no. The expense of reticence is boringness, and if you want literary gossip you’ll still have to go to Virginia Woolf, and if ...”

“... As the ‘intelligence war’ escalated, it was left to officers from MI6, in particular Michael Oatley, to find a more constructive approach, and he conducted secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... his two younger sisters, their aunt, their grandmother, the houseboy.’ The ‘houseboy’ was Michael, who hadn’t believed Tunde when he said that men had landed on the Moon. ‘There would have been no way to tell Michael all this, to tell him that the Moon is real and space travel is real and doubt is real as ...”

“... intimate world of the international Latinate élite of humanist Europe. The scholarly career of Michael Screech is of itself commentary on that momentous intellectual revolution, since it was Screech’s devotion to the achievement of Rabelais that led him into the world of Erasmus, from whom Rabelais, like Cervantes, took his inspiration. The most recent ...”

“... a more damaging charge – especially since it was linked to the somewhat improbable vision of Dr Robert Runcie, as a spider at the centre of a web of intrigue, still manipulating everything his own way. But the question, of course, is not whether what Dr Bennett wrote was wounding or damaging: it is whether or not it is true. Has the Church, in fact, in ...”

“... Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland ...”

“... few, if any, human beings are in fact well-placed to alter it in an intended manner. Professor Robert Neild’s polemic is concerned with a more parochial topic than his title suggests: not with making up one’s mind about the Bomb but with the more manageable task of making up one’s mind about the proper role of the Bomb within the defence policy of ...”

“... the pipes in 1715 and 1745. The real squeeze was in the pocket. Hoppit quotes a feisty diatribe by Robert Freebairn, a prominent Jacobite in 1715 (although he was the queen’s printer), who had to flee to the Continent after the rising was put down:Before the Union we have no Taxes but what were laid on by our own Parliaments, and those very easie, and spent ...”

“... birth, life, death and meteoric rise to fame, Ern Malley has continued to provoke virulent debate. Michael Heyward’s shrewd and funny book not only provides full social and literary contexts for the affair, but explores Malley’s almost equally intriguing afterlife. Much to the dismay of his two inventors, he was no sooner invented than he cut loose and set ...”

“... by ‘nomenklatura’, a more systematic term developed by the Djilas admirer and Soviet dissident Michael Voslensky. In the United States in the 1960s, neoconservatives, most notably Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recycled the phrase ‘the New Class’ to refer to parasitic public sector bureaucrats who were making the US ‘a society of public affluence and ...”

“... cinema he said he wanted to create a modern movie theatre. That was fine, he was told by Robert Stern, who was overseeing the town’s look, as long as Pelli understood that as far as Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney ...”

“... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...”

“... public reaction to the book has centred too narrowly on its slighting references to ex-colleagues. Robert Harris’s furious depiction of it (in the Independent on Sunday) as spluttering with ‘rage, malice, contempt and hatred’ is probably the extreme case. The memoirs of other premiers, Harris notes, have shown saintly restraint towards erstwhile ...”

“... Sisman is not usually taken in, least of all by unsubstantiated assertions from Taylor himself. Robert Cole’s book, The Traitor within the Gates, forms an instructive contrast. In his treatment of several episodes, Cole has placed his reliance on the authority of the autobiography. For example, he simply reiterates its hard-luck tale of how Taylor’s ...”