“... looked like, to those who saw it anticipated all around them. Other essays in the first half (‘John Donne: “Farewell to Love”’ and ‘Jane Austen and the Business of Mothering’) aren’t about death but do explore authors’ writings to elicit patterns of feeling or of the want of feeling. Though none of this is explained in principle, some ...”

“... to Poles Apart: The Public Sedans of Bygone London, a pamphlet by Geoffrey Wilson (Connor and Butler, £5.95), ‘the first public hire chairs in Britain appeared in London in 1634, after Charles I had granted a warrant to Sir Saunders Duncombe, a gentleman-pensioner of the King, giving him the sole right to build covered chairs and operate them for hire ...”

“... London and Oxford in 1882 and 1883, and created a baronet in 1888. And then there is the case of John Arlott, once Forster’s producer at the BBC and later a broadcaster possibly even better known and loved than Forster himself, though here having to answer to the first name ‘George’, perhaps by contamination from the actor George Arliss, once, but no ...”

“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster or Whitehall. Since ...”

“... Except for two years as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page ...”

“... a major contribution to it. Nineteenth-century intellectuals had a choice to make, spelt out by John Stuart Mill: either to follow the lead of the idealist and Romantic Coleridge, or of the materialist and political liberal Bentham. Judging by Mary McCarthy’s examples, imaginative writers tend towards quietism or the political Right, and it is easy to see ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir ...”

“... implications of Blake’s debt to Macpherson’s Ossian. Of Williams’s first trio of writers, John Barrell, on the period 1730-1780, applies theory to practice most fully and intelligently. Barrell’s ‘Equal, Wide Survey’ deals with topics associated with Williams – pastoral poetry and language – but handles them in an unabashed scholarly ...”

“... been in 1938? Barnett’s most scathing judgments on wartime social reform are reserved for the Butler Education Act of 1944. According to his philosophy of history, the proper function of an educational system is to supply industry with skilled and scientific manpower, thereby augmenting the power and efficiency of the nation-state in a ruthlessly ...”

“... contest of 1963. Macmillan, after much vacillation, decided that the main thing was to defeat Butler and that Hogg was his man. Home concurred, though he feared that ‘complete disunity’ and great troubles would follow. This gradually hardened into a resolve to stand himself. Meanwhile Hogg, overcome by excitement, threw his hat into the ...”

“... witnesses. These include the stiff-backed statesman whom Max Beerbohm called ‘Britannia’s butler’, two twin widows on a Gospel quest, a get-rich-quick bride in Amazonia, a caustic spinster in India, a writer of fairy-tales, a future poet laureate teamed with a leading delineator of bosoms and bums, and a respected novelist earning his crust in ...”

“... doubts about the dossier: similar doubts were expressed by nuclear experts. We shall see what the Butler committee finds. Where were the bogus stories about Iraq’s supposed nuclear programme coming from? In the case of the Niger connection, the documents could have been forged by an Iraqi exile group, but the available evidence points to MI6 as the sponsor ...”

“... Both knew what they could do, and did it to perfection. ‘I shall have to go on hoeing the old butler row,’ remarked Wodehouse in a letter, with his usual sunny equability. Waugh, as his last stories reveal, could not do without his Ambrose Silks and Agatha Runcibles and Peter Pastmasters. But one must not press the analogy too far. Waugh did become ...”

“... cheap, and indeed looks very cheap as long as the cost of maintaining libraries is not counted in. John Burrows’s project of putting a dozen novels onto a computer was plainly from the first going to prove expensive. When one begins to cost Burrows’s travel, subsistence overseas, and time, together with computer-time, programmer-time and secretarial ...”