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“... is very similar to that of a very different kind of MI6 book, from St Antony’s College, Oxford. Anthony Verrier’s Through the Looking-Glass is written with MI6 experience, which is a plus, and is enfeebled by his incapacity to name names and his willingness to act as an apologist for his MI6 friends. These are two large minuses: on Ireland, for ...”

“... ecstasy. I hope to hear much more of it. At first it seems improbable that The Venetian Vespers by Anthony Hecht should be able to sustain the weight of its three epigraphs: one from King Lear, one from Moby Dick and one by Beethoven. And indeed, Hecht’s shorter poems, chatty and clever, with their immense vocabulary and consummate prosody (why is it that ...”

“... four plays – a mixture of world-weary society comedies and contemporary melodramas – on in the West End. He would write 24 plays in all – they were the foundation of his very considerable wealth – and most were carefully calibrated to titillate his audiences with their advanced views on social convention and snobbery, while at the same time portraying ...”

“... that ‘every Shakespeare-lover’ has the right ‘to paint his own portrait of the man’, Anthony Burgess published his version in 1970. Though ‘eschewing invention’, he confessed to an element of ‘conjecture’, adding that the reader should spot his venial departures from fact and excuse them as inevitable in the work of a fiction-writer, his ...”

“... Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight, Peter was quite prosperous and it showed. He dressed out of Sportique, an establishment – gents’ outfitters wouldn’t really describe it – at the west end of Old ...”

“... about the demographic shift in the United States from the North-East to the Sun Belt of the South-West; and the commentators on politics have been eager to explain that among the consequences of this shift is the Reagan Presidency. But our perception of US life and letters has not yet been affected; our listening posts on this side of the Atlantic seldom pick ...”

“... and figured as an ethical alternative to exports from the slaveholding colonies of the British West Indies. By choosing to purchase ‘free’ sugar, traders and consumers, both British and American (especially the abolitionist Quakers of the eastern seaboard), could attempt to erode the domestic markets on which slave traders preyed and prospered.Of the ...”

“... at Folkestone. They themselves lived at Sandgate, a more socially eligible strip of coast to the west. They also possessed an inland cottage at Bishopsbourne in the Elham Valley, where in the summer they retired to ‘the country’. Bishopsbourne was the neighbourhood to provide Brooke’s earliest memories, most beloved centre for imaginary adventure in ...”

“... to climate change.Modi has counted on sympathetic journalists and financial speculators in the West to cast a seductive veil over his version of political economy, environmental activism and history. ‘I’d bet on Modi to transform India, all of it, including the newly integrated Kashmir region,’ Roger Cohen of the New York Times wrote in 2019 after ...”

“... 160 amendments suddenly appeared on the order paper. Twenty-seven of these were in the name of Sir Anthony Kershaw, paid Parliamentary consultant to the biggest tobacco company in the world, British American Tobacco. These zoo amendments took all day. The tobacco Bill was talked out. Sir Anthony Kershaw told Peter ...”

“... Even the most experienced punchcutters could only complete one letter a day: in 1818 Anthony Bessemer testified to an anti-forgery inquiry that it took him 12 weeks to finish a set of 61 punches. And it was aching, dexterous work, six days a week. Only Sundays were free from tools, piles of sifted soot (to check the print as you worked) and tiny ...”

“... Bishop’s war effort was brief. In August 1943 she worked in a navy optical shop in Key West, taking binoculars apart to clean them, but eyestrain made her sick and the acid used to clean the lenses caused eczema. After five days she was honourably discharged. Bishop did accept that ‘Roosters’, written in Key ...”

“... acknowledging with a gulp that this is, to everyone’s astonishment, a total victory for the West, can be heard nervously reflecting about how they are going to live with it. ‘In Paris,’ writes Professor Joseph Rovan in the Frankfurter All-gemeine Zeitung of 8 February, ‘people are alarmed at the idea of the enormous economic and political ...”

“... Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Russia in 1951; Kim Philby was finally exposed in 1963; Anthony Blunt in 1979. The first three took refuge in Russia. Blunt died in disgrace, deserted both by the Leftist friends of his youth and by the Royal Family and his colleagues in the Establishment, who had patronised him in his prime. All through this period ...”

“... Rebecca West died 17 years ago at 90, in a comfortable flat overlooking Hyde Park. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, to her amusement and gratification. Will she be remembered more as a character, thoroughly damely and commanding, or for her writings? Eleven novels, of no outstanding literary merit; nine other books on general subjects, of which the most admired (and especially relevant today) is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on Yugoslavia; a mass of articles on the public affairs of her time ...”