“... showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but sagacious readers will instantly agree that the proximity of another plausibly Shakespearean poem surviving only from ...”

“... British. In 1947 the Colonial Office, at the instigation of the head of the African division, Andrew Cohen, changed its mind about the proper way of dealing with nationalists and momentously decided that in the spirit of enlightened self-interest it was best to enlist their co-operation in various aspects of administration. The men-on-the-spot were never ...”

“... surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...”

“... when faced with endless aisles crammed with heavily decorated household goods and furnishings. The young William Morris found everything ‘wonderfully ugly’. Ralph Wornum, a future keeper of the National Gallery, said: ‘the paramount impression conveyed to the critical mind must be a general want of education in taste.’ Auerbach comments: ‘There was ...”

“... Gorbals Diehards took on the Bolsheviks in Huntingtower, crackhead gangs are fighting it out. Andrew O’Hagan’s threnody for Scots socialism, Our Fathers, has Hugh Bawn making his way to his dying grandfather’s Ayrshire flat through a mob of giggling, doped kids. O’Hagan himself has talked of the more general problem of reaching the chemical ...”

“... edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another context – is either played for laughs or set against the poet’s ‘sun-comprehending’ side. In the life ...”

“... which more in a moment) was that they ‘did not know how to hate’. ‘I love him,’ he said of Andrew Bonar Law, almost the only politician he had any time for, ‘because he hates.’ The objects of his hatred were many: Liberals, socialists, Irish Home Rulers, the Irish Free State (the ‘Free State of Evil’), possibly the Irish themselves (‘the ...”

“... alter the party beyond recognition, assisted by social-media-savvy but politically inexperienced young people (plus a smattering of old Trots). Labour’s political identity and its inheritance of practical knowledge, both the product of long, often bitter experience over more than a century, are consequently seen to be under grave threat. The same facts ...”

“... Spanish friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus put up a theatre and a shopping portico in 19 bc: the still young branch of the Museo Nazionale that now occupies the site is unique in devoting most of its attention to the early medieval development of Rome, when the grandeur of Balbus’ days was long gone. Because it tries to musealise generations of Roman history ...”

“... is meant as a joke. 15 January. Go into the chemist in Camden High Street to find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorising the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying: ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole shop’s mine. It’s bought ...”

“... to Mary’s cohabiting with Clark is modesty. She has tattooed on her backside the message, ‘Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave’, Hilton being her former London fence. This embarrassment is cleared up, however, and Mary goes to live as Clark’s housekeeper by day and his bedwarmer by night. In an epilogue, we learn that the hero deserts her when ...”

“... The invitation to irony runs out fast, but the film does a reasonably good job of evoking the young Evita, the kid who runs off with a lugubrious tango singer (played by Jimmy Nail as if the mourning had started already), and takes on the big city. Madonna has all the bounce that is needed, and manages to combine an effect of ruthlessness with an effect ...”

“... to war failed to survive Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor; his next film, The Remarkable Andrew (1942), was a whimsical pro-war comedy (tag-line: ‘By thunderation, I’ll show America how to get tough!’). If Johnny Got His Gun ‘is any good at all’, Trumbo wrote to his publisher, ‘it is good as an argument against war.’ The argument is ...”

“... renaissance. Lean Tales bears witness to its health and energy. In one Gray story published here, young Alasdair’s journey of 1959 seems to anticipate Kelvin Walker’s. ‘A Report to the Trustees of the Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship’ presents impressions of London and points south to Gibraltar. As the train trundles out of Glasgow ...”

“... something you’ve forgotten. Private Eye began in 1961. Ingrams wanted to call it the Bladder. Andrew Osmond wanted to call it Finger. At the same time, Bruce Page was discussing a gossip-and-disclosures magazine with Christopher Booker; Page wanted to call it Bent. Though he later became an occasional butt of the Eye, Page is an editor with very similar ...”