“... but beyond adepts of the cult of either, to no more effect. Powell’s work fits Moretti’s rule best. It is consistently the funniest English narrative of the last century; the proportion of comedy in it is far larger, and far more entangled in a specific society with an unusually complex class stratification, and a specific language with an exceptionally ...”

“... greenhouse effect.’ There isn’t consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many possible avenues of research are being explored, and it’s still too early to say which, if any, have a reasonable chance of leading us out of the woods (or rather the desert, or the floodplain). The ...”

“... Gallery for Beyond Caravaggio, now in its last week. It’s a mixed bag, with far and away the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin, a superb painting but hung on the same wall as the National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus. This is nowhere near as good because the central figures don’t compare. In the Dublin picture Christ with his ...”

“... undoubtedly carried a doctrinal as well as a personal connotation, but it may be that it is best understood in a sense personal to Thatcher; that this helps to explain its ideological resilience in face of the intellectual and empirical frailties of its doctrinal claims; and that the fall of Thatcherism was irreducibly personal in its trajectory. The ...”

“... by the prime minister. Our fearless leader is a democrat only as and when it suits him. 20 March. Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is ...”

“... across his book. But his argument shifts the main burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome ...”

“... allusive replies to critics of the first edition of the book – replies which Wallace does his best to elucidate in footnotes, but which are often pretty confusing. Still, the drift is clear: just because we have recognised the silliness of the claim that Christianity was ‘just superstition and priestcraft’ we need not run to the other extreme and say ...”

“... to be suspicious of each other and obsessed by security: but they should also recognise that their best men are less likely to be the bureaucrats than those who are mildly mad or who have flair, like Guy Liddell. Unfortunately SIS also attracts the deranged, whose schemes are as mad as they are. I remember hearing in the German section of War Office ...”

“... terms. ‘There is no plan by the university to break any trusts,’ Davies and the dean of SAS, Nicholas Mann, stated in 2007. This sounded reassuring, but it emerged in the recent court proceedings that no one in the university bothered to show the trust deed even to their in-house legal adviser until the summer of 2008. Up to that time the university had ...”

“... denounced his own father?) One could also question Slezkine’s premise. The émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in his book The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (1946) noted with approval a process of routinisation in the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, Trotsky had observed the same process, which he called ‘The Great ...”

“... For that he had recourse to an unidentified draughtsman he called “Arthur”, and more often to Nicholas Hawksmoor, upon whose professional expertise he relied for the realisation of all his major buildings.’ The engineers, Arups, are Rogers’s Hawksmoor, Laurie Abbott and others his ‘Arthur’. Rogers, who was a dyslexic and could hardly read before ...”

“... on both sides and open to the whole city. The Vatican Library, founded at the same time by Pope Nicholas V, occupied a set of four rooms, each with its own purpose. It too was open, if not to the public, at least to all members of the papal curia. And it too was a secular, humanistic collection inside an ecclesiastical institution. It soon became an ...”

“... themes of the volume figure in articles on the religious roots of Irish political ideologies (by Nicholas Canny and David Miller) and, rather incongruously, on the role of the potato in Irish demography (by K.H. Connell and L.M. Cullen). All four are seminal pieces, which have stimulated lively debates and further research. What gives most coherence to this ...”

“... a saintly, extravagantly learned Byzantinist who was on the fringe of my family circle (the best friend of a cousin by marriage), and Nicholas Riasanovsky, a Russian historian. We were to give out money for graduate research projects. I couldn’t call Alexander ‘Onkel Paul’, as I might otherwise have ...”

“... her work at Gazelli Art House earlier this year. Both have covers featuring Boty with one of her best-known paintings, With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo (1962). On the Gazelli book she sits below it, wearing a high-necked dress and looking down coyly at the cat on her lap. On Kristal’s she is in front of it, staring straight out, naked. Boty saw parallels ...”