“... Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen, three historical figures woven into this tissue of intensely cross-referenced truths, halftruths and lies. As he stumbles around on the trail of Destry-Scholes, Phineas G. – short, spotty and socially inept – improbably acquires not one but two sexual partners: a sun and a moon goddess (as he puts it to himself). The ...”

“... we can only speculate as to what continues to hold up publication of the second. Partisans of Anthony Julius’s 1995 study, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, will have reached their own conclusions. The anti-semitic charge was squatting awkwardly on Eliot’s reputation long before Julius’s book, but old habits of deference died hard, even ...”

“... it on the day the Supreme Court approved Trump’s ban on Muslims, and the day before Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and Germany were knocked out of the World Cup. Not that episode 11 provided any answers; not that the series was confident about its questions. As fellow-victims will know, and in the pattern of many long-form television ...”

“... some Catholic ceremonies, godly ministers might refuse to use a ring at weddings or to sign with a cross at baptisms: without these details, were couples properly married, or children properly christened? Couples themselves might object to a ring, or parents to a cross – and a conscientious minister might then report them ...”

“... Graphics. So I have a little pile of pieces of paper with ‘ideas’ roughly drawn on them: a cross with a pirate flag, a ghost caught on barbed wire, an egg on a tightrope, a cage in prison. Next to me I have a tea trolley with paints and water on it. I draw the picture in pen and ink, colour it in: if it works, I frame it. I can do about three a day at ...”

“... or anything personal. Yet Liddell was a considerable man in every way. After winning the Military Cross in the First World War, as both his brothers did, he spent the entire period after 1919 in counter-intelligence. He and his eccentric wife, the Hon. Calypso Baring, formed the centre of a large dinner-party world in their Cheyne Walk house designed by ...”

“... New Review, and the poem shows, with the kind of grim undemonstrative intelligence the novels of Anthony Powell know well how to reveal in horsey men, military men or men in bars (one of his characters called Odo Stevens writes Ewart-type poems), just how much Ewart as a poet owes to his attitude to other poets. I always try to dislike my poets, it’s good ...”

“... that Adams was guilty? And if we don’t, why does he get an entry? Wickedness, in the case of Anthony Blunt, actually pays off rather handsomely. He gets a four-column entry against the average two, and it is unlikely that this would have been his lot had he been listed merely as ‘art historian’ and not also as ‘a communist spy’. (Donald ...”

“... or from Canton to Johor. As late as the 18th century, Eliza Pinckney averred that she ‘would not cross that frightful ocean’ again ‘for the best fortune in England’. But was this enough to create the peculiar synchronicity of Hampshire/New Hampshire? Probably not. The six authors in Colonial Identity rightly stress the immediate political, religious ...”

“... political broadcasts (begun in 1951) and the odd ministerial broadcast of the kind pioneered by Anthony Eden. Mr Cockerell’s treatment of his subject is strictly chronological. He starts with Earliest Times and finishes at the Present Day. Well, not quite the present, for the closing chapter takes us only to the last General Election. Earliest times in ...”

“... William Pitt the Younger’s voice. Or at least that’s how the story goes. New versions of this cross-generational vaulting circulate now and then: a man who saw Abraham Lincoln being shot in 1865 was on a TV show in 1956; a retired friend in Canada recalls her now deceased Hungarian friend Dorothy telling her that her mother had been walking in the park at ...”

“... of the most senior SACP members, made no mention of it during the five days that he spent under cross-examination. Although far more was made of Mandela’s five-hour speech, Sisulu’s performance was more remarkable. Held in isolation, unable to consult his comrades or his lawyers, surrounded by intimidating policemen and warders, hectored and pilloried ...”

“... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second World ...”

“... London. The place and time correspond with a particularly terrible missile strike on New Cross on 25 November 1944. The novel is a sort of counter-history, imagining that five of the children killed on that day escaped unharmed, and charting the lives that they might have gone on to lead. Although Spufford makes clear in his acknowledgments that the ...”

“... to do battle against her, but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be made of itself by the so-called ‘Alliance’? Yet I wonder. Asquith’s long tenure as ...”