“... speaking which would offer an advance. There is no sign that this is likely to happen. True, Sir Peter Medawar effected a brief release when challenging his field’s version of the nature-nurture antithesis with the instance of innate potentialities never to be actualised unless the environment were right. But feud is collusive, and the parties usually ...”

“... are erudite and caustic: a sting in the tail of this sometimes bland collection. Certainly, Peter Gay should read Lloyd-Jones whenever he feels a fit of hyperbole stealing over him. ‘The astonishing range of Freud’s discoveries, his unparalleled gift for reading evidence’, ‘advocate of genius’, ‘this courageous exploration’: by the middle ...”

“... 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make Austen possible, but if you feel her ‘distinction’ you will also feel that ‘life ...”

“... a runner, he would win the 100m and the 5k, but would be best-known for his marathons. His coach, Peter Nielsen, describes him as an ‘incredibly annoying opponent’ because he is happy to grind away for hours at positions most top players would accept as a tie. He often upbraids colleagues who agree to early draws, arguing that they should play out the ...”

“... Tynan was the first, and flamboyantly the foremost, of their number. In fact, his father Sir Peter Peacock, chairman of the family chain of Midland drapery stores, could easily have sent him to a public school, and wished to. But his mother, Letitia Rose Tynan, feared that if he left home, he might discover his parents’ guilty secret. She and Sir ...”

“... essayists and tellers of unpopular truths, and now, spurred by the appearance four years ago of Peter Davison’s marvellously thorough complete edition of Orwell’s writings (and no doubt with an eye on Orwell’s centenary, which falls this year), he has written a short book entirely devoted to telling us, as the title of the US edition has it, ‘Why ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”

“... I’d written about another recent film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (an adaptation of James Lasdun’s story ‘The Siege’), which was somehow rated PG. Much of the time I spent with my parents was in foyers and auditoriums across London, and on the journeys there and back. My mother was the more regular companion, my father the more ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book takes a different approach. In an effort to get away from the ‘big meta-narrative’, Walvin presents biographical sketches of three participants in Britain’s 18th-century slave economy. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave captain ...”

“... islet is crammed with men: Chief Vorstenbosch, Deputy Melchior van Cleef, Dr Marinus, Senior Clerk Peter Fischer, Junior Clerk Ponke Ouwehand, Arie Grote, Piet Baert, Ivo Oost, Wybo Gerritszoon. Their conversation is as cacophonous as their names. For instance: ‘most of us hands gather of an evenin’ in my humble billet, eh, for a little hazard ...”

“... loose with the dates and the references, claiming for example to have conducted an interview with Peter Lawford, the English actor and member of the rat pack, on a date some time after his death. Kelley is not just mean, or dangerous: she has a very powerful understanding of what makes a modern celebrity. She gets the journey, to use a favourite Oprah ...”

“... within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband (whose razor-sharp instinct for leadership contests led him to back Liz Kendall), Steve Coogan, Matthew D’Ancona, Betty Boothroyd. Papers aren’t just papers any ...”

“... field.Only eight years before, the high master of the fee-paying Manchester Grammar School, Eric James, had argued against greater social mobility as an educational objective, writing in the Guardian that ‘we must recognise with greater frankness the facts of human inequality.’ True, he admitted, children at academically selective (as well as ...”