“... Church of England within Christendom. Fisher was undoubtedly the victim of royal tyranny, but it may be unhelpful to describe Henry VIII as ‘the most contemptible human specimen ever to sit upon the throne of England’. Moreover it is questionable whether Fisher displayed that capacity for leadership – ‘clarity and confidence of vision, tenacity of ...”

“... and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book. It has none of the sleazy sanctimony of Robert Sencourt’s biography, or the vanity of T.S. Matthews’. That it is a feat to be without spite is coincidentally manifested by the appearance of Geoffrey Grigson’s Recollections. Grigson’s jacket proffers, as a representative gnome: ‘I never heard ...”

“... There may not be any royal road to the understanding of an alien or half-alien culture – contemporary Japan, or the Medieval West – but one path which appears to lead into the interior is the study of that culture’s heroes. If we can only discover why, say, kamikaze pilots or Medieval saints have been singled out for honour, so the argument goes, the basic values of the culture which admires them will be revealed ...”

“... for breaking the rules he contrives still more firmly to despise the French for keeping them’ may sound a little bald, but a sarcasm about a sarcasm doesn’t comfortably cancel out into wholehearted approval. If Pope welcomed Boileau’s authority, and even ‘the Critick’s Law’ it partly rested on, he was more insistent and more eloquent than most ...”

“... improvement in readability is enormous, for, through Henry, that inspired comic creation, Berryman may be said to have found his own distinctive voice. Berryman’s early work is strenuous in manner, full of devices learned from his poetic forebears: Milton’s substitution of adjectives for adverbs, for example, or Hopkins’s expressive breaking and ...”

“... wrong to think of its impact as a fortuitous calamity, like the Falklands adventure. Scargill may serve as a surrogate Galtieri so far as Thatcher is concerned, but she herself has supplied us with the crucial distinction between them in speaking of ‘the enemy within’ in July 1984. The phrase is a pregnant one, and not only in the sense that its ...”

“... but after the Revolution Locke faded from sight across the Channel. At home, however his fortunes may have gone up or down, the topics that he discussed came to constitute philosophy. Locke was no sceptic, in the philosopher’s sense of that word, but he surely was sceptical. English-language philosophy has been sceptical ever since. Locke set the ...”

“... London in the late Twenties finds himself over sixty years later an American citizen, described by Robert Fagles as ‘arguably the finest Classicist of our day’, by Peter Green as one his nation ‘ought to bronze’, and by Jasper Griffin as a man ‘one would like to have as a friend’. In his long career he has written on many subjects: scholarly ...”

“... of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or bourgeois, Calvinist or ...”

“... the past by Harold Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year ...”

“... of ordnance in Aideed’s yard was firmly told to forget about it. (His discovery occurred as Robert Oakley, the President’s special representative, was wheedling Aideed and his enemy Ali Mahdi Mohamed into a hug opportunity for the cameras.) Any questions about disarmament have been met by the commanders of Operation Restore Hope with an insouciant ...”

“... without the intervention of experiments that might show such a theory to be highly presumptuous, Robert Laughlin cautions against searching ‘on smaller and smaller scales for meaning that is not there’. Laughlin’s central argument is that instead of becoming obsessed with ultimate theories we would do better to focus on those properties of matter that ...”

“... essentially eventless waiting-to-be-a-writer. Fleming’s life was not like that. His grandfather Robert was a Dundee book-keeper who left school at 13 and went on to become a fabulously rich man by more or less inventing the investment trust, the first of the pooled investments which now dominate the financial world. ...”

“... better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert Dallek scooped him with ...”

“... books on manners tried to refine the practices of bed-sharing, spitting and blowing the nose (one may read about the ‘sociogenesis’ and ‘psychogenesis’ of these teachings in Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process, and doubtless elsewhere). Two centuries ago, when John Debrett became a miscellaneous publisher, his contemporary advice-givers had moved ...”