“... president and governor of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre over many years and supported both Peter Hall and Peter Brook at a time when their avant-garde work frequently brought storms of criticism. He had a voracious appetite for both English and French literature and liked to hunt down French novels on the Left Bank. In most un-Tory fashion, he formed an ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing with words relating to sex and bodily mutilation. The second of the three was an unnamed American living in ...”

“... need to read WikiLeaks’s unexpurgated accounts of skulduggery or even the scrupulous novels of John le Carré: to see what a mission really looks like one only has to watch the Al-Bustan Rotana’s CCTV footage, released on the internet by the Dubai Government Media Office last spring. This half-hour of footage is a gift to novelists who idealise the ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... intellectually dishonest... they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspitters and royal bumsuckers right down the scale’). Mostly, though, he responds equably to the irritations incident to his professions. A certain Stephenson wanted the Hogarth Press to publish his book on citrus culture in ...”

“... belt’ areas, described many years ago by our foremost environmental geographer, Peter Hall, as ‘a civilised form of apartheid’. Greenness is flexible. It means whatever each of us decides it should mean. Plenty of people, undeterred by history or events, see it as the natural habitat of the political Left. Peter Gould, in his very agreeable ...”

“... faiths is forcibly intruding itself on the religious practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and ...”

“... normally followed by a Hardyesque nemesis, and fall to the old social station, suggests that John Jorrocks, preposterous though he may seem, is a more realistic conception than Michael Henchard. Jorrocks is elected to the Commons at the end of Hillingdon Hall, but Surtees never wrote a sequel. Gash feels that ‘it ...”

“... Edith was with them politically. ‘She even consented to appear on the platform in the Conway Hall at a meeting to discuss the formation of a Domestic Servants’ Union, and spoke shortly and to the point – after the chairman had announced that her employers had given her the afternoon off for the occasion, at which the audience clapped.’ Edith had ...”

“... through to the country’s bookshops four years ago the notorious World according to Garp by John Irving. The result was a letter to Literaturnaya Gazeta by an enraged ‘intellectual’ who had bought the book for his teenage daughter. He intended it to help his daughter in her English studies, but instead found himself bombarded with all sorts of ...”

“... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... owned public places (a particularly egregious example is the area in front of London’s City Hall, which is owned by Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund). In Paris, the left traditionally marches between République and Nation. But the gilets jaunes rejected this système manifestant. They occupied roundabouts, making the case – as with their bright vests ...”

“... the political message it conveys is that to him that hath, it shall be given: not only Hintlesham Hall to live in, but John Cleese and Joanna Lumley for company, and a useful collection of cashmere sweaters to wear on the HTV series which spawned the book. We further learn that HTV’s ‘imaginative and ...”