“... He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting. His tone was querulous. He felt that we (I myself was one of the ...”

“... been put down to an essentially personal hatred of Mrs Thatcher, but the blander unionism of Mr Major seems to be proving even more unmarketable. Beneath the ritual knockabout of party politics, a consensus has emerged which has slipped away from the commonalities of ‘Britishness’. Moreover, this reaction is considered rather than emotional. Anyone ...”

“... advocacy of slavery was undoubtedly intended as a provocation, but was not necessarily insincere. John Law of Lauriston made his own distinctive contribution to the debate, in Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Law’s panacea was a system of paper money, underwritten not by precious metals or the ...”

“... hymns and liturgical texts. One could scarcely imagine a better concise guide to the Scrolls than John Collins’s The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography. Collins, who teaches at Yale, writes with clarity and liveliness, and throughout his account exercises great judiciousness, a quality that has not always been prominent in discussions of this subject. For the ...”

“... alone on the Left in their ability to raise the obvious questions about how the world works. As John Lloyd puts it in his opening chapter: ‘The global movements’ – his term for the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation milieu – ‘have found new ways of exercising political power . . . They can generate widespread public sympathy and a degree of ...”

“... Epithets like ‘disenchanted’ come to mind. That is because I have been reading the latest of John Gage’s books, Colour in Art. Gage’s achievement, here and in Colour and Culture (1993) and its successor Colour and Meaning (1999), is to tinge colour with time like no writer before. His curious and scrupulous mind teases out countless nuances in our ...”

“... ecumenical initiatives of Dury and Comenius. Those themes, rich and richly documented, still lack major studies. Admittedly, princely support for the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after ...”

“... the city, in Beverly Hills or West LA, the canyons or Pacific Palisades. But in the decade of his major work, starting in 1947, Ryan kept a certain distance from the rest. And he was unusual in other ways: during the McCarthy years, together with his wife, Jessica, he founded a progressive school in the San Fernando Valley; later he would be a steady presence ...”

“... and fabrications of others, and had justified doubts about some of the work of one senior scholar, John Payne Collier. Halliwell was still only 20 when, in 1840, he joined three distinguished figures – Alexander Dyce, Charles Knight and Collier – in founding the Shakespeare Society. Collier was then around fifty, with another forty-odd years to live. He ...”

“... that ‘in extremis’ presumably refers to. By the early 1970s, Calcutta had ceased to be a major centre of commerce and industry. Howrah, just outside the city, where the factories were once located, became a purgatory for small enterprise, with businesses – among them my uncle’s – waiting, sometimes for years and years, to die. The lights went ...”

“... it is that although, for the first time in the history of the modern nation-state, the world’s major powers are not engaged in direct geopolitical and military rivalry, but solely in economic rivalry, ‘the United States has striven to become the most overwhelmingly dominant military power the world has ever seen.’ The presiding asymmetry of the present ...”

“... have a great deal in common. All have close connections with the intelligence services – after John Sawers retired as head of MI6 in 2014, he took up posts at King’s and RUSI – and an equally close relationship with the national security establishment of the United States.Among the British defence intelligentsia, Atlanticism is a foundational ...”

“... Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since the appearance of these anthologies, no other major British publisher has challenged their dominance.What does Clare Bucknell mean by ‘British culture’? The first chapter of The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture covers a four-volume series of anthologies, Poems on Affairs ...”

“... was daringly alluded to by one of the more active covert gays of his time. There was a major release of new material with the grandson Charles Tennyson’s 1949 Life. Now – in the age of the welfare state – the poet’s gloom was traced to his deprived childhood. Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby ...”

“... Spain. And if he pined for his great love Rapún while he was in Argentina in 1933, at least two major ‘infatuations’ in Buenos Aires consoled him. Lorca sometimes felt the need to excuse his good spirits and to reassure listeners that he really had tragic depths: ‘contrary to what people think, I’m not a happy poet but a sad one.’ The ...”