“... was a live one, working hard, after paying its respects, to defuse the purple excesses of Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. This is P.D. James at her best; the fastidious dabbling in horror, the forensic eye finding order in chaos. Now, 22 years later, with the oven-ready blockbuster, Original Sin, she returns to cover the ...”

“... up from there being so much travel: Last thing, after the doors, the windows and the light in the hall, I come up and for the fear the cat might stifle the baby I put the suitcase across the stairs. We are walled in by dreams of travel ... And the modesty of his enterprise, its accuracy, gives it a reticent charm beside the self-observant adventures of ...”

“... least signalising most of these gaps. But his footnotes are sketchy and often vague, his prelims do not extend beyond antiquarian jottings entitled ‘Particulars of the Life of Samuel Pepys’, and he does not bother about such matters as cross-references or literary allusions. In general, he does not gloss obsolete phrases or special usages: he simply ...”

“... upon a time a bird was ill, and a cat, bending down to it, said, “How are you and what do you want? I will give you everything, only get well.” And the bird replied, “If you go away I shan’t die.”’ ‘Is this the nonsense man?’ John Ruskin asked, after receiving a letter from Lear that detailed his latest ventures in painting. He ...”

“... song because it never says she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story. You just know that she must have been black. But then you know that Zanzinger is white, though it never says this either. It’s a terrible thing that you know this from the story, and from the perfunctory prison ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some ...”

“... he was 12, Redgrove suffered from ‘what he called “robot obsessional automatisms”, mainly to do with washing’. In his teens Redgrove began to associate mud with eroticism. His poetry returns again and again to moments connected with the sort of experience detailed in his unpublished memoir ‘Innocent Street’, where, using language familiar to ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the Cold War drew to a close, his patience with politicians and writers of the left ...”

“... of the kingdom, is 32. Across the peninsula, the majlis, the tribal equivalent of a fractious town-hall meeting, has been reduced to a perfunctory ceremony, if not abolished. Saudi petitioners no longer throng through the royal gates on Tuesdays and Fridays to share a meal with their leaders. The new rulers appear to their public on ubiquitous billboards, but ...”

“... in 1968, remains exceptionally hard to find in this country. Now the second collection, Points de Repère, issued in France in 1981 (revised 1985), is available, in a rearranged format with a translation by the late Martin Cooper, under the title Orientations. It is a pity that we do not have both collections freshly to ...”

“... so popular that her younger sister Marie took to sniffing the hats of gentleman visitors in the hall to work out who was paying court that evening. Betsy chose André, and is described as putting her hooks into him (‘mettre le grappin’). André’s parents weren’t keen, but she outmanoeuvred them, despite the difficulties of a wartime wedding. When ...”

“... only a smattering of training … the dynamite bomb seemed tiny in proportion to its capacity to do harm; it could fit easily into a small bag or even a pocket. Using the pages of the Irish World, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa collected more than $20,000 within a year. Even those among the nationalist Irish-American groups who supported the idea of a bombing ...”

“... is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she humps pallets up and down the lorry and does everything a male (and younger) lorry driver would do, with only a certain doggedness about her actions an indication of her gender. One or two passers-by look ...”