“... ardour, like Wilson’s respect, never dimmed. ‘Greatest’ is still hotly argued but no one would object to ‘most famous’, at least for a time. While courting the expensive girl, Fitzgerald was also working on a novel he had begun at Princeton. At first he wanted to call it ‘The Romantic Egotist’ but, thoroughly reworked, it appeared in ...”

“... the campaign and have now come in from the cold. These include Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton and Sarah Palin. All of them are touted as potential cabinet appointees but all of them have enemies among the Republicans in the Senate who could block their bids for office and return them to permanent vacation as back-up commentators on Fox ...”

“... of the Lubetkin and Tecton High Point flats, and of William Lescaze buildings for the Darlington Hall Estate, are still wonderfully convincing. Attempts to make the same style work cheaply do not. Wells Coates’s Minimum Flat was all too easy to translate into something which offered a minimum life. Artist-designed fabrics on the whole do not stand ...”

“... before any Booker Prize is won and wined and dined. It is work that would be missed if there were no one, and no place, to do it. Little magazines helped Ted Hughes, who is now a welcome Poet Laureate. Poets Laureate pre-date the world of Public Lending Right; they are a survival from a remote past, where poetry was ...”

“... the workings of the machine. For those who point out that Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, already did this – did they? Their 2017 manifesto was radical in terms of spending, but startlingly conservative in its presentation of Britain as an autonomous economy, rather than a few pieces on the extra-jurisdictional patchwork of other ...”

“... in porcine disguise ambushed and assaulted New Age travellers en route to Stonehenge: there is no monument). The Imber Model should be followed and the mostly worthless buildings of Bulford, Durrington and Larkhill demolished to accommodate a northern loop in the A303, which will avoid Stonehenge then turn south to rejoin the current route west of ...”

“... by Goubert in the first instance as ‘of the British type’, was sometimes attached to the town hall as proof of the ‘democratisation of water’, but it was as a centre of social life – and of gossip – that it made its way from politics into literature. In Zola’s L’Assommoir there is a vivid account of ‘the wagging of tongues’ as the washing ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”

“... for a long time ineffectual) efforts of one local magistrate, Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall, to secure their conviction. It is an extraordinary story very well told, largely in the words of the original depositions and other papers in the public records and in the extensive Fleming archive. Macfarlane’s principal aim has been to put the present ...”

“... Sloth, by bringing on Disease, absolutely shortens Life.’ ‘The cat in gloves catches no mice.’ ‘A watched pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA ...”

“... me. I might be tempted to use words like ‘psychotic’, or ‘psychopath’, but your creator, John Banville, would understandably resent these catch-all categories, as restrictions on the subtlety, the complexity, the truth of his creation. If it is possible to get at the truth of this elaborately inventive tale. The elaboration is in the incidental ...”

“... Sunday Times book, Philby, the spy who betrayed a generation, which he co-authored in 1968. Mr John Costello has produced Mask of Treachery, dealing with Blunt, while Mr Robert Cecil has written a biography of his former Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean. To round things out, we have The Storm Birds, Gordon Brook-Shepherd’s study of the Soviet ...”

“... all, a discussion within Calvinism, within esoteric Christianity, and within European Romanticism. John Herdman’s new study is an honest piece of work, a little bit underpowered, but with a thesis. This is that the theme of the double – a theme so dear to James Hogg, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky – has its origin in Christian dualism, and then becomes a ...”

“... movement. Cheyette traces the Disraelian influence on the ‘imperial Gothic’ fiction of John Buchan and, more controversially, borrows August Bebel’s phrase ‘the socialism of fools’ as a blanket term for the ideas of Shaw and Wells. Bebel’s concern was to attack the kind of socialism, typified in a British context by H.M. Hyndman, which ...”

“... my might.   As he slumped to the ground and fell backward, I saw I had kept my word. His nose no longer projected, his teeth were gone, and where his face had been, a bloated mask of crimson was forming before my eyes. And a hole in this was screaming ... More interesting than the refutation of the slurs is the question of how they arose. Envy might ...”