“... cheer to the rafters each time Germany scored a goal. 8 June. Spot the typo, spare the blush. John Vincent writes from the University of Bristol: ‘In your memorable diaries you quote Disraeli’s view of May 1881, a month after his death. Would that other historians had access to such primary sources!’ 14 June. Alan Bennett’s letter to the LRB about ...”

“... a greater strangeness in the French. I was struck by the slight oddity of the word ‘only’ in John Sturrock’s ‘their only honour is precarious, their only liberty provisional . . . their only position unstable’ and found nothing like it in Scott Moncrieff, although all the nouns and adjectives are the same. Proust’s idiom is the almost baroque ...”

“... in the Atlantic world, and tells a simpler story of British vision and courage against American foot-dragging. Rough Crossings is divided into two parts, each named after an exceptional Englishman who exemplifies ‘the promise of British freedom’. The first half introduces Granville Sharp, a pioneer in London’s anti-slavery movement before the American ...”

“... Iran. In addition to the CIA estimates, Richelson relies primarily on standard works – John W. Lewis and Xue Litai’s China Builds the Bomb (1988), George Perkovich’s India’s Nuclear Bomb (1999), Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (1991) – which he supplements with memoirs and ...”

“... of its own director general and his second-in-command, no less. Andrew counts MI5’s Operation FOOT of 1971, when 105 Soviet agents were identified and then expelled en masse from Britain, making us a much ‘harder’ espionage target than we had been, as a great success; though it’s hard to see what the practical gain was. It should perhaps be ...”

“... In the months that followed, alarm seemed to grip the police, who felt they were on the back foot. Special Branch – the covert unit of the Met which gathered intelligence on perceived state-subversives – began sending weekly reports to the Home Office predicting what protesters would do next. In one report, a Special Branch chief inspector, Conrad ...”

“... 1989, of the convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguires resulted in the appointment of Sir John May’s inquiry, which was in part stalled by the prosecution of four of the police officers involved in the case. But when in 1991, piling Pelion on Ossa, the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Government was ready the ...”

“... was guaranteed to increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter ...”

“... early 1950s to create a network of heliports across the region, public transport was on the back foot. Some modes (buses and trains) were scaled back, others (electric trams and the overhead railway) eliminated altogether. A new underground rail system planned in the mid-1960s was only partially completed. Cars were the future. In the early 1950s one in ...”

“... Register called it ‘Silly Billy’s Tomfoolery’ and dismissed its ‘indecent trash’. John Bull said that ‘the dirty abominations of the raffs of literature are far below notice,’ then devoted three issues to reviews, spoofs and comments on the book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a ...”

“... but pleasing, somehow, to me. I was nudged in his direction by my graduate supervisor at Oxford, John Bayley, a wonderfully subtle and wide-ranging critic who as far as I’m aware never wrote about Firbank himself. I was embarking on an MLitt thesis looking at the way gay British writers, in the early and mid-20th century, had negotiated the necessary ...”

“... as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... like J.R. Ackerley’s father, or a conman like Tobias Wolff’s, or a bullying drunk like John Burnside’s, or a cold fish with a secret past like Germaine Greer’s, but a man with a hearing disability who tried to do the best by his family and whose one attempt at corporal punishment – a boot up his son’s backside – didn’t connect. With so ...”

“... order’ – illegal enemy combatants – said by the former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo (the author of two of the infamous legal memoranda on the legitimacy of torture) to be, yes, equivalent to pirates. We are back at the door wherein we came. It might be thought remarkable that a scholarly book, published as the US administration, in the ...”