“... Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession ...”

“... examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common ...”

“... villagers, to 10 Downing Street. A life-long member of the Labour Party, Gould presented Harold Wilson with a wreath made of ivy picked from the ruins of the cottage in which he had been born. He also gave him a letter, reminding him of Churchill’s pledge and pleading the Englishman’s right to go home. If Tyneham was not to be released, then he at least ...”

“... into those who followed academic precepts, often slavishly but sometimes imaginatively (Reynolds, Wilson, Barry and West), and those whose paintings were, in important ways, anti-academic, or ‘English’: Hogarth himself, Zoffany, Wright of Derby, Stubbs, Gainsborough, Rowlandson and Blake. The second group all shared something of Hogarth’s ...”

“... window and spit on the other children. 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in ...”

“... his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly with his origins. ‘For all the dramatic changes that were to occur ...”

“... in the sense that Archer first agreed to see the author and then thought better of it – Jonathan Mantle sets out to scrutinise Archer’s career. Together with Justice Caulfield he asks, ‘What is his history?’ and then proceeds to unearth information which was never aired in the High Court. There are some interesting passages. Mantle does well ...”

“... in for the kill as their old middlebrow bête noire found itself middle-aged and broke. Harold Wilson and Spike Milligan joined forces to save it, but the D’Oyly Carte Company sank in 1982, scuppered by the Arts Council. The hope and expectation clearly was that the whole show would vanish with it. HMS Pinafore would go down with the last of the ...”

“... of tar-water. The phenomenon of projection is parodied by Berkeley’s fellow Anglo-Irishman Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where projectors at the Academy of Lagado devise schemes for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, building houses from the roof downwards, and reconstituting the food ingredients of excrement. In A Modest Proposal ...”

“... money will go to the wrong writers, or to too many writers, encouraging a general sloppiness. As Jonathan Coe says, ‘it’s no surprise that the few meagre Arts Council grants are often handed out to writers who never go on to fulfil whatever promise was recognised.’ And Don Paterson: ‘It’s still easier to get money for that ...”

“... and pilloried for publishing supposedly treasonable works whose authors remained concealed. Being Jonathan Swift’s printer was not a job for the faint-hearted. John Locke fearlessly inscribed his name on the title page of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, but went to great and fearful lengths to preserve the anonymity of his more political ...”

“... studies in the politics of literature by British literary historians such as David Norbrook and Jonathan Dollimore. These essays, which originated as lectures, are certainly dazzling performances. To historians like myself, what is most impressive about them is not the attention to historical context, which we have been trained to expect, but the subtle ...”

“... He was sensing the possibilities that were to come to fruition in the European Community.’ And Jonathan Spence, discussing The Temptation of the West, a supposed exchange of letters between ‘AD’, a Frenchman, and his Chinese correspondent ‘Ling’, is more venturesome still, It is never safe, and often folly,’ he admits, ‘to call any writing ...”

“... enough for Kipling to get to know him. The workers for the most part seem to have ignored him, if Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes is any guide.* Populism doesn’t necessarily make a person popular, as a story told in a footnote in Gilmour’s book suggests. The ticket collector at Etchingham station sees Kipling trying ...”

“... violence in Belfast forced hundreds of (mostly Catholic) families to leave their homes. Harold Wilson’s decision to send in the army – nominally on a mission to protect civilians, but really in support of the ‘civil power’ whose writ no longer ran in Derry – changed the parameters of reporting for the BBC and other media outlets. With British ...”