“... seen playing tennis only three weeks before. Gladys (who later came to prefer her second name, Mary) was somewhat bemused, particularly since Harold, already, in Pimlott’s words, ‘cheerful, boastful, absurdly sure of himself and confidently planning the future’, went on to tell Gladys that he intended to become an MP and, ultimately, prime ...”

“... essays emphasise Fisher’s career as an outstanding scholar. An important paper by Stephen Thompson shows that he was also a model bishop, residing in his diocese, preaching, ordaining priests in person, generous in his charitable giving. Henry Chadwick offers a sketch of the royal supremacy that Fisher was combating, but discusses it as a matter of ...”

“... not excluding Paradise Lost (the wonder is that it hasn’t already been filmed, with Emma Thompson as the narrator and Denzel Washington in the title-role). Meanwhile, Behn’s plays have attracted stars as expensive as Jeremy Irons and Christopher Reeve, and she herself, now conscripted to the cause of postcolonialism as well as that of feminism, has ...”

“... the figures tramping the roads were the ‘simplers’, sellers of herbs for cooking and strewing. Mary Leech and Judith Vardey, mentioned in the records of the Fleet Market in the 1730s, sold ‘Phisick Herbs’ such as mugwort for ‘women’s irregularities’. Every summer, well into the 19th century, hundreds of women came from Wales and Shropshire to ...”

“... Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. In April, the House of Commons responded by voting for war with France. Initially, that war, which would continue intermittently for much of the next century, was fought in ...”

“... through a fraction of a degree and the centre of the arch drops a millimetre or so. Sinclair Thompson, the engineer who surveyed the church, takes the long view. If movement is ancient, very gradual and not accelerating, heroic measures – tie bars, underpinning – are not even considered. The good news is that St George’s is remarkably sound. It was ...”

“... no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the potting-shed and coming away. Except then I call in at the church which is full of the sound of hoovering, a friendly grey-haired man, Welsh, who may be the vicar, though I don’t like to ask, seemingly vacuuming ...”

“... writer who ‘really understood’ Novalis, as she wrote in a letter to Kermode. Penelope Mary Knox began life ‘as a brilliant young woman from an exceptional family, of whom much was expected’. She was born in December 1916 in the Old Palace of the Bishop of Lincoln, the second child of Christina Hicks, the bishop’s daughter, and Eddie ...”

“... the early Auden. (He does not, however, give us the earliest text of ‘Spain’, defended by E.P. Thompson in ‘Outside the Whale’.) Some critics would see Tony Harrison as a leading continuer of the radical tradition. Where Hill eschews the prosaic, Harrison courts it, pushing poetry to the brink of banality in the manner of the Lyrical Ballads, trying ...”

“... underlies a variety of Wellesian peculiarities. To Bill Alland, a longtime Mercury colleague (Thompson in Citizen Kane, the shadowy reporter in search of Rosebud), it explains Welles’s difficulty memorising lines. Never quite knowing his lines prevented Welles from inhabiting a character, or ‘surrendering’ to it. ‘If he ever let himself go in a ...”

“... most aggressive form of cancer – a death sentence.’ The last-ditch effort, ‘a true Hail Mary’, was the injection of an artificial virus into his brain. Hunter sat by Beau’s hospital bed, they watched Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Beau, who had stepped down as Delaware’s attorney general, talked about running for governor in 2016. He died on the ...”

“... Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a review, also in 1989, of Hugo Young’s biography of her, R.W. Johnson was also ...”

“... any comparable body before the present day. Unlike their 18th-century Jacobin predecessors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, or their Victorian successors such as Harriet Taylor and Josephine Butler, the Owenite feminists ascribed sexual repression and exploitation, not merely to the imbalance of power between the sexes, but to the whole structure of private ...”

“... nothing. If it is to be like that, let it be like that.’ In 1936 Beckett wrote from Hamburg to Mary Manning in further despair: ‘My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. And with every ...”

“... in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them, there was ...”