“... and backgrounds of corrupted and corrupt. Between the feudal union boss, Andy Cunningham, the King of Durham, the gifted, charming civil servant George Pottinger, and the compassionate hospital administrator George Braithwaite, there was little in common except a willingness to sell the stewardship of their offices for the backhanders of an unqualified ...”

“... Became Shakespeare.2 As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt’s effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd’s generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography,3 into a cocked jester’s cap. The ploy of concentrating on the events of a single exciting year neatly leaves out much of what can make the average cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare seem ...”

“... would have agreed. The godly were wont to describe anything they disliked as ‘popery’; but, as Peter Lake has observed, that doesn’t mean they were right. Their use of the label was often inaccurate – a phenomenon that my graduate students at a Catholic university notice with amusement. The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven leaves local and regional ...”

“... and portraitists of high society, von Stuck, von Lenbach, those habitual dinner guests of the king of Bavaria, all too painfully evident figures in Mann’s Munich, where no writer had ever received any such honour. ‘Von’ Aschenbach was displaced wishful thinking (though ‘Thomas von Mann’ would have sounded grotesque). From the perspective of ...”

“... no fewer than 6.2 million working-class electors had voted for Churchill in 1951, how was it, as Peter Shore was plaintively to ask in a Labour Party pamphlet of 1952, that so many who were neither wealthy nor privileged had been recruited to a cause which was not their own? The answers, at the individual level, are many and various. Family ...”

“... again a willed brightness was overtaking Pym as he listened to the many voices in his mind. To be king, he repeated to himself. To look with favour on this child that was myself. To love his defects and his strivings, and pity his simplicity.’ Adults spy on childhood just as children spy on them. The childhood apprehensions of Jane Eyre or Pip from Great ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a few months after Princess Ratibor became his fifth wife, he complained to her cousin, the actor Peter Eyre, that she could be ratty and was frequently boring. Then he made a pass at Eyre. He took on tougher opposition with Number Six, the ferocious minx Barbara Skelton, part-original of the lethal Pamela Flitton in A Dance to the Music of Time. She had ...”

“... is at constant risk from a bout of amnesia. In his recent book on the office of Prime Minister, Peter Hennessy tells the story of how Whitehall forgot how to declare war.* When officials thought it might be useful to know how to do it, just after the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It ...”

“... to stay and look. ‘Why do you think we have suddenly become so interested in early cinema?’ Peter Wollen asks at the end of the new edition of his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. ‘It’s more than archaeology. It is to regain a sense of cinema as potential, not yet frozen into the world spectacle. It is to imagine a renaissance.’ Bordwell, I ...”

“... was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its composition. Locke’s second Treatise, it emerged, was written ...”

“... had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had turned king’s evidence to save his neck. Others came from thoroughly peaceable trades: a hatter, a pastry-cook, a button-maker, a saddler and a shoemaker all signed up in the course of the next few decades. The court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the ...”

“... him, isn’t he?’ my granny would say. ‘Always had a dark side. Probably got it from his uncle Peter. He was like that as well. Morbid.’ ‘You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself,’ my father would say. ‘If something ever happens to you, I suppose you’ll want one of them statues to yourself up in the Glasgow Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I ...”

“... goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered her into literary history as ‘H.D. Imagiste’) she wasn’t swerving from prejudicial gendering so much as ridicule ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”