“... censured Mr Cecil Parkinson and suggested he should resign: two Tory MPs, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and the Mayor of Potters Bar. Ranged against this lone and motley quartet were the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the Chairman of the Conservative Party, most of Fleet Street, 70 Tory MPs, 62 per cent of the British public, Bernard Levin, 90 per cent of ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... Irish nationalist with socialist leanings, close to Fenianism and even closer to the position of Michael Davitt’. In Inventing Ireland, Kiberd writes: ‘Yet into his own exile Joyce took with him the ancient Gaelic notion that only in literature can the consciousness of the people be glimpsed.’ Again, there is no footnote. Joyce, he writes, ‘attempted ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered. She was staying with her grandparents. ‘On television the reporter was talking in a portentous voice over ...”

“... new religious context’. An example of the latter is ‘well-dressing’, the habit of decorating wells and springs with flowers or prayers tied to bushes – offerings that were once directed to water goddesses. But the boundaries of ‘pagan survival’ are blurred. Many things that were cited by folklorists a century ago as vestiges of prehistoric ...”

“... to Evelyn Waugh but to Rebecca West and Arnold Bennett – the young and the old alike – H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning, Anthony Powell. In his time Gerhardie was at least as potent a literary influence in England as Hemingway, and more pervasive, more part of the new metropolitan air that English authors breathed: they absorbed him as ...”

“... Peregrine, head of the ‘secret’ service, on his victory over democracy, the Bishop of Bath and Wells is there, ‘looking years younger’. Being more of a Footite (roughly speaking again), I don’t believe in these bogey-men: their coven seems to be under the chairmanship of the very fat man who waters the workers’ beer. William Boyd brings us back to ...”

“... defendant and Gaitskell as Treasury prosecutor. No one who has served in a Cabinet (including Mr Michael Heseltine today) would fail to recognise the reality of the problem and, given the political sensitivity of the National Health Service in the Labour Party (or of defence in the Conservative Party), its explosive potential. Bevan first fought a successful ...”

“... and oblique, and when passing under the shadow of some secondary passion. Joy, for instance, that wells up from constitutional sources, joy that is ebullient from youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhibits, in the person of Matthew, the village schoolmaster, as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow.’ He felt obliged – an obligation ...”

“... well as important work on particular phases or aspects of the Bard’s life by Honigmann, Stanley Wells and others, but Shakespeare: A Life can make some claim to be the first sustained scholarly attempt on its subject since the books written by Edgar Fripp and E.K. Chambers in the Twenties. Its very existence is the symptom of a quiet renaissance in a branch ...”

“... Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes in The Skeptical Tradition and elsewhere, as well as in papers by Michael Frede. But what is also needed is a more elementary account of Scepticism, a presentation of the Sceptics’ main approaches when undermining their opponents’ views and reaching their own position. This need is addressed by The Modes of Scepticism, a ...”

“... on it as he awaited the outcome of the power struggle – and the circumstances of their flight. Michael Black’s admirable little book in the Landmarks in World Literature series, analysing in close and illuminating detail the plan and growth of Sons and Lovers, and emphasising Frieda’s sense of the novel’s ‘form’, makes the proper companion piece ...”

“... I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one of Michael Clark’s earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, barebottomed in Bodymap and long sleeves. There wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and ...”

“... the houses of Connell, Ward and Lucas, Maxwell Fry or Ernst Freud, and utopian one-offs such as Wells Coates’s Isokon building. It was also in Camden in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this white-walled, abstract, often low-rise high modernism was emulated in social housing, in extraordinary projects such as Alexandra Road or Highgate New Town. This ...”