“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”

“... 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of those, and had to make do with speaking in tongues (Acts 2.4), having visions (Acts 2.17) and receiving words of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12.8) instead.* I was 17 years old when I started. I was from Essex. I’d ...”

“... accounts of his life. Early Protestant accounts were more conflicted. In his ‘Book of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ...”

“... previous trip) and the registration number of my car (nobody penetrates the security barriers on foot), and looked forward to my Friday afternoon appointment at Gate 1A. It had taken weeks to set this up, but I wasn’t surprised when, a couple of hours before I set off for the Blackwall Tunnel, the tour of inspection was cancelled. Deferred ...”

“... as the Lucas van Leyden, a painting I find ravishing but can’t find much to say about, is John Sell Cotman’s Greta Bridge, a watercolour in the British Museum. I was brought up on Cotman, in that they have a very good collection of his work in Leeds, most of it bequeathed by Sidney Kitson, who was so fond of the artist he was said to suffer from ...”

“... completed even six months’ service.’ Conrad’s journey to his steamship from the coast by foot, with 31 Africans as porters, took from 28 June to 1 August. At one point in his very sketchy diary, he noted: ‘On the road today passed a skeleton tied up to a post. Also white man’s grave – no name – heap of stones in the form of a cross.’ Conrad ...”

“... gallant men, and I thought them fools.’ What, I wonder, did these ‘fools’ think of John Milton as he watched and judged and yet abstained from their pleasures? Towards the end of his Latin poem on the death of his university friend Carlo Diodati, Milton expresses the fear that he might sound ‘turgidulus’. He then launches into a description ...”

“... is different: how seldom in our time a writer gets a second chance. If you start off on the wrong foot, as she admits she did (‘I wrote as lushly and as loosely as I could’), you’ll be lucky if anyone notices when you change step. This, too, I can corroborate, in a way that does me no credit: disliking her first book, Loss of the Magyar (1959), I wrote ...”

“... in 1968. Several of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh ...”

“... of its maturity’, without trying to find validation for that style in personal tragedy, as John Berger apparently did. For Berger, Hyman writes, ‘the late nudes were the sole redeeming component in an oeuvre otherwise “intimate, contemplative, privileged”; it was the “tragedy” of his relationship with Marthe that “ensured his survival as a ...”

“... posthumous progress through the collective psyche of her country’. Historians, beginning with John Foxe and William Camden in her own time, and extending across the centuries to Patrick Collinson and David Starkey in our own, have examined Elizabeth’s reign from a variety of angles, analysing its various subtle strategies and compromises, attempting to ...”

“... book would have been unputdownable. He corresponded extensively with Pope and Richardson. He gave John Gay a job on his periodical The British Apollo when the future Scriblerian was newly arrived in London from Devon, and was an early and influential advocate of the Scottish poets Mallett and Thomson (the bardic conception of the poet’s role elaborated in ...”

“... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...”

“... anti-ministerial ‘Advice to a Painter’ satires were absurdly attributed to the royalist poet John Denham); and in the case of published books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious ...”