“... enjoys abundant affection from crime-readers but not quite the esteem that Mesdames Rendall and James reap, it may be because his solutions are sometimes less than convincing. We don’t always get the feeling that in his beginning was his end. The solution to Plaster Sinners does not seem inevitable, and is not particularly surprising. Added to that, the ...”

“... letters some glimmers of his old genius for descriptive prose, a genius liberally represented in Lord Clark’s Ruskin Today, first published in 1964, which Penguin has restored to print. Generally, however, the famous lapidary style of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice doesn’t often appear in Ruskin’s side of the correspondence. The Carlyle of ...”

“... force a rose from the sand. It’s a big, bold blowsy note to open on, and not at all untypical. James Merrill, a poet of some breeding and considerable refinement, once remarked, in his essay ‘On Literary Tradition’, that ‘it’s a bit snotty to nudge the reader too obviously with references to Virgil or Eliot’, but Walcott remains an unashamed ...”

“... had been well and truly forked off their lives. With the notable exceptions of Magnus Mills and James Kelman, most British writers don’t make a habit of writing about what’s at the centre of most people’s lives. And I don’t mean sex: that’s peripheral, like God. The last great English novel about work, about its anxieties, distortions and ...”

“... isn’t like that,’ they’re off the hook. 20 February. We’re gradually assembling a class: James Corden, who’s plump and funny and at the audition entirely takes charge; Sacha Dhawan, an Asian boy from Manchester who complains that all he’s ever offered these days are Muslim terrorists or Afghan refugees; Jamie Parker, who is to play Scripps the ...”

“... he forged a valuable connection with a fellow well-educated privateer, the son of Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. By the end of the 16th century, Essex had been tried and executed for treason, but Donne had a job as Egerton’s secretary, a place in his household and every prospect of a successful career at court.And then a cataclysm: he fell ...”

“... Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it ...”

“... professor of psycho-physiology at the University of Geneva, friend of William James (and later Carl Jung) and enthusiastic debunker of putatively occult phenomena. Since the late 1880s Flournoy, whose deceptively chivalrous, self-effacing manner concealed a penetrating forensic intelligence, had eagerly sought a medium on whom to test his ...”

“... Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the countess patronised were James Thomson, John Gay and George Frideric Handel (of whom she painted a portrait), all of them occasional guests at the Ashley-Cooper family seat, St Giles House, at Wimborne St Giles in Dorset.My interest was much piqued by the fact that I knew the Wimborne St ...”

“... of steaming-hot intestine looping round you on the floor. I remember an interview with the late Lord Rees-Mogg where he told me at length ‘what mothers want’ without seemingly at any point wondering whether I might be a mother … Such people are quite fun to interview because you can suddenly prick their balloon with a rude question and watch them ...”

“... on gossip, rumour, etiquette and protocol, reputation and ego. In all of this William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) was the master. ‘The court hath the trees of paradise,’ he wrote in 1569, from which grew the knowledge of good and evil – courtiers could flourish or fail, and staying power counted. To make sense of the bubble in which Elizabeth and her ...”

“... the publication of the first of the eight volumes of her History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line in 1763 still remains largely unknown, as does the way she endured the social and intellectual obscurity that lasted from her controversial second marriage in 1778 to her death in a small Berkshire village in 1791. She had ...”

“... imply a social practice which it offers to articulate. So it is misleading to say that Bloom is a Lord of Misrule, as if the phrase referred to a social or public role he could be said to play. Putting these two ideas together, Parrinder reads Ulysses as a realistic novel, complete with characters and plot. He thinks Bloom a pretty solid citizen – ‘No ...”

“... of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough Whitlam’s Government in Australia, have put together a remarkably well-informed, coherent and readable survey of this vast territory, clear and simple enough for the absolute beginner and yet full of ...”

“... in the memorial street-furniture of the Grace gates that open onto the élite end of the ground at Lord’s. There was a time in the middle of the last century when that same Lord’s was on its uppers, with little or no idea how to stage matches that people might pay to see; the MCC couldn’t any longer raise the ...”