“... the talent for comedy revealed in her letters. Staying in Rye with Alec Vidler, former dean of King’s College, Cambridge, who was helping her with research for The Knox Brothers, she described the house party to her daughter: a trendy cleric, his dull wife, a long-skirted daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to ...”

“... source-hunting and explorations of Eliot’s use of Grail mythology or Wagner or the Fisher King of the kind one finds in Cleanth Brooks’s 1939 study of The Waste Land. ‘T.S. Eliot and Obsessional Neurosis’, Jarrell planned to call it, and one can surmise the argument he intended to make from the paragraph he devotes to Eliot in a lecture of 1962 ...”

“... Jeremy Corbyn, however maladroit and out of step with the party’s rebranding since the era of Michael Foot, is the darling of the growing Labour membership, and that his performance in the general election of 2017 vastly exceeded the party’s expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s ...”

“... an essay in the New Statesman. Blair’s retainers dutifully lauded the essay: David Miliband, the king over the water, described it as a masterclass in political argument. In fact, the piece is an embarrassment, a mixture of reheated Blairite cliché, regurgitated Silicon Valley TED talks, and analysis of the British cultural landscape as found in the comment ...”

“... man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the ...”

“... and London politics. Livingstone was welcomed to power with the headline ‘Red Ken Crowned King of London’. John Carvel shows what a mockery those words were and are. Britain is the most over-centralised state in the Western world, in which local authorities have always been tightly hobbled, and today the Government – through ...”

“... and pop-eyed, Saying the gains the SDP has made All clearly point to a retreating tide. Thus King Canute spake as his feet got wetter, But further up the beach his court knew better. But now a comic opera interlude Wins our attention from domestic cares. The generals in the Argentine, though rude And cruel and prone to giving themselves airs, Have in ...”

“... 15 months later. We differed sharply over our tactics. Some of us – notably Colin Phipps and Michael Barnes – thought that we non-MPs should force the pace: that the way to produce a breakaway from the Parliamentary Labour Party was to make it clear to our old friends there that we intended to set up a separate social democratic party whether they ...”

“... control of the conventions he uses than St Paul, and the single essay on the Pauline Epistles, by Michael Goulder, does full justice to the Apostle’s originality, and his ability to outsmart his opponents by mobilising the rhetorical devices of his day. With the Gospels, the interplay of individual literary skill and the dictates of literary convention are ...”

“... spent two periods in Saudi Arabia: 1978-80, and 1982-84. Her husband was on the staff of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh – the scene of VIP accouchements, and a discreet refuge for the odd royal alcoholic or drug addict. Riyadh in 1978 was a huge building-site. Life was noisy, comfortless, monotonous. Strangely, Ms Mackey considered ...”

“... of those with Christian backgrounds who remain uncertain of New Labour’s merits, such as Michael Meacher, an Anglican and ex-Bennite, or the Old Labour heirs to Eric Heffer, a staunch Anglo-Catholic, or Tony Benn, an agnostic who nonetheless argues that ‘the moral roots of socialism lie in religion’ and that ‘political agitation is groundless ...”

“... ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and ...”

“... all recruits, they were required to hold a Bible and take the oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, his heirs and successors. According to Joe’s army record, he was demobilised three years later with ‘good character’, and no medals to suggest that his intention was anything other than to stay alive.I sent a copy of Joe’s ...”

“... discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s receiver’s accounts, say, or records of Yorkist estate management.The TV ...”

“... gain its independence just five years after the wedding was filmed? Did she dream up the name King Galen? Were the terrorists who imprisoned Krystle and Alexis Communists? Nationalists? Romanian-speaking Serbs, perhaps? The answer is that it doesn’t matter, provided you are writing about the Balkans. In her 1925 novel, The Secret of Chimneys, Agatha ...”