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“... roused my own antipathies as early as the second page of his novel: Kepler, arriving at a Bohemian castle, is greeted by a hump-backed dwarf who pipes, ‘God save you, gentles,’ and to make matters worse has second sight. When Tycho Brahe, Kepler’s host, appears, sporting the metal bridge in his damaged nose, he bemoans the loss of a pet elk that has ...”

“... deals Plato a terrible blow ‘with a feathered verse’, but Aristotle stands ‘firm as a castle on a hill’ for all that Horace, Homer and Virgil can do. In the end Logic tries to arrange a truce, but the effort fails dismally because her messenger, having fatally neglected the study of grammar, cannot speak plainly and never gets to the point. As ...”

“... own lifetime often transformed into palaces or just ordinary houses. As the human function of the castle changed, so did its symbolic meaning. Once a symbol of power, of the mailed fist, the castle was as an image in the 16th-century internalising itself, could even represent the battle for virtue on the part of the human ...”

“... of the soul’s struggle. Agnostic readers probably feel easiest with them when they are funny: Barbara Pym pleases by her disengagement, by avoiding a charismatic or the enthusiastic tone. Mary Hocking is not at her best in this mode. She is better on the larger themes of dying and the remaking of relationships, but her moral points are close to the ...”

“... observed about an incident in which he revealed his support for Winston Churchill instead of Barbara Castle. Bevan felt an affinity with Churchill, and perhaps hoped for an analogous vindication in ignoring all the ordinary rules of political advancement. Crossman warned Bevan early in 1956 that he must play with the team if he was ever to have a ...”

“... might bite. Davenport-Hines finds all this contemptible: men (and the occasional woman, such as Barbara Castle) bent on power and using prurience and censoriousness as a way to get it. It is all too easy to take the moral high ground when politicians are making a mockery of their own public standards; much harder to contain the corrosive effects of ...”

“... it. This made her an unusual Conservative. It also caused some of her opponents to misjudge her. Barbara Castle, who consistently both admired Thatcher and underestimated her, supported her Private Members’ Bill in 1960 on the grounds that it could only aid the Labour Party in the long run. ‘It is always the progressive movements which are ...”

“... two planks, nonetheless spent her girlhood obsessively reading the books of her step-grandmother, Barbara Cartland. But she was better than Cartland, whose books invariably ended happily for their good girl heroines after a vicissitude or two. Diana understood the more compellingly modern psychological drama of the ineluctably unhappy ending for those who ...”

“... information about Clark’s work at I Tatti, at the Ashmolean, at the National Gallery, at Windsor Castle, for Covent Garden and for the cause of conservation; he documents committees attended and lecture tours undertaken, books written and unwritten, houses bought and sold, acts of charity discreetly performed and romances secretly conducted. Even if we take ...”

“... dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and political dinosaurs who can’t switch off. But there’s a great ...”

“... According to Barbara Tuchman, quoted on the jacket, there is ‘a startling royal family scandal buried at the heart’ of this biography of Queen Mary. What steaming titbit can her fellow American, Anne Edwards, biographer of film stars, have turned up at this late hour? Can it really be that rather overworked rumour that identifies Prince Eddy, the Queen’s first fiancé, as Jack the Ripper? Indeed it can ...”

“... factor in this transatlantic shift has been the skill and commitment of his English translator, Barbara Wright, who has brought to Pinget’s work a well-deserved reputation for managing to translate the untranslatable – Albert-Birot and Queneau, to name only two. In her article on ‘The “Trials” of Translating Pinget’ in the current Review of ...”

“... Unabombers without typewriters – while others shine for a time then disappear. Marion Barbara (‘Joe’) Carstairs, the subject of Kate Summerscale’s vastly entertaining new biography, The Queen of Whale Cay, would seem to fall into the latter category. In the Twenties, Carstairs (1900-93) was briefly yet wildly celebrated as the ‘fastest ...”

“... sharp-eyed, dispassionate post-mortem on what actually happened in the making of Kane, and Barbara Leaming’s almost embarrassingly intimate monitoring of the variations in the maker’s oft-told tales during what turned out to be the last five years of Welles’s life, finally extinguish the myth that the newly-made master-piece was an instant and ...”

“... from the Heritage Lottery Fund – has involved entirely remodelling and expanding the gallery, on Castle Street, that sits in front of the house, in a way that is inspired by the 1970 extension. The architect, Jamie Fobert, who redesigned Tate St Ives and who is about to start work on the National Portrait Gallery, describes the extension as ‘a masterpiece ...”