“... the following day, ‘his body was found intact and uninjured, still fully clothed and looking more like sleep than death.’ Across the bay, the Younger Pliny spent the rest of the day with his books, ‘as this was my reason for staying behind’. He had a bath, ate, tried to sleep. As the ground tremors got worse, he went outside with his mother and ...”

“... In​ their groundbreaking biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William Laud, the archbishop of Canterbury ...”

“... narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of ...”

“... for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities. The enemy has stayed the same – roughly, overweening literary Modernism. Has Carey’s curious Oxonian populism truly changed, or just, as it were, moved ...”

“... high claims for them or confessing to a guilty fondness. J.R. Watson’s The English Hymn is a far more ambitious book, charting the history of the English hymn from its origins in the metrical psalmody of Sternhold and Hopkins in the 16th century through almost to the present day. It is a work of distinction, written with eloquence and grace. Watson writes as ...”

“... in, he is the only postwar US president whose administration is responsible for the deaths of more Americans than foreigners. During this year’s presidential campaign, while the gap on domestic policy has widened, any hint of foreign policy differences between Trump and Biden has evaporated as they each homed in on the status quo. Both have promised to ...”

“... Britain, he drifted from hospital to hospital, diagnosed with ‘soldier’s heart’, a complaint more common than shellshock. Writing to a friend, he notated his heartbeat’s irregular waltz and wild dynamics. He was also a ‘bundle of oppressed nerves’, and began to exhibit symptoms of schizoaffective disorder. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote from an outpost ...”

“... Temple Church, scarred in 1941 (with dark appropriateness) by a war whose technology was even more impersonally brutal than his own military prowess. There you may still look down on the face of one of the earliest military tomb effigies in Europe. If we are familiar with the medieval monuments which now jostle each other in churches, we tend to forget ...”

“... only to be told that Albania didn’t really have one.In the postwar years, Albania became more royal than the king. It broke with the Soviet Union after Khrushchev tried to shut down the Stalin cult in 1956. It broke with China in the late 1970s when Hoxha sensed Beijing was cosying up to the West (Mao, Hoxha decided, had been playing a ...”

“... to see himself as Trotsky’s heir, Djilas wasn’t prepared to form a political faction to demand more democratisation of the state: his revolt rested on his private sense of morality. This made him a natural candidate for heroism in the West, but a vexing figure in Belgrade, where, as the people’s ideological fervour waned during his long imprisonment, it ...”

“... small cells of activists – like CORE’s Freedom Riders – were larger, better organised and more powerful than they were. The black freedom struggle in the 1940s was every bit as large (or small) as it was in the early 1960s. The difference was magnification through the camera lens. Arsenault’s subjects have a heroic quality and, as such, the book can ...”

“... provided early 19th-century Liverpool with its intellectual aristocracy. Somewhat later, Liverpool more than anywhere else produced that strange anomaly, the Conservative working man, who kept Liverpool Toryism afloat. Liverpool was also distinguished by the rule of the party boss. The Conservatives had a whole dynasty of them: Sir Arthur Forwood, Sir ...”

“... prose. For learned disputes had gentlemanly antecedents, and so had learned fabrications; even Thomas Warton was guilty, and he was the author of the standard History of English Poetry, a work some Shakespeare hunters saw as a model for their much desired history of English drama. The deceits practised by the 19th-century forgers were ...”

“... inextricable in Greene’s work – the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory is a father in more sense than one; Scobie in The Heart of the Matter (1948) is driven to suicide by his faith and his unwillingness to repent of his adultery – but the entanglement is knottiest in The End of the Affair (1951). The novel concerns the aftermath of a ...”

“... it was the right choice for the novel: separating Jim from his parents is a neat way to convey to more cosseted readers the strange combination of deprivations and freedoms that life in the camp consisted of. There were many children who were interned in Lunghua without their parents. Ballard describes one of them, Bobby Henderson, in Miracles of Life: Bobby ...”