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“... with Victoria’s music being no exception. Rees is more neutral than that; but I feel he is so keen to downplay the fact that Victoria was a priest (often made too much of in commentaries on his music) that he misses the special message that Victoria has embedded in the work. Throughout his setting the dominant force is light, and wherever ‘lux’ is ...”

“... it seems there is seriously slack footnoting in much modern German and Italian scholarship. He is keen to establish that good footnote practice started much earlier than is sometimes supposed. The ‘ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes’ is said to be Peter Lombard in the first half of the 12th ...”

“... man was to fight if needed. Early Tudor Englishmen liked military kit, even if they weren’t so keen on actually using it. Increasingly sophisticated guns became popular, as did armour, from the inexpensive almain rivet (plate armour manufactured in southern Germany) to the handsome gilded Greenwich armour favoured by the elite. As well as status and ...”

“... plot to get rid of Scott. Despite support from the militant Young Liberals (whose former chairman, Peter Hain, insisted that ‘we are with you in resisting the politics of smear and innuendo’), Thorpe resigned as Liberal leader in 1976, soon after Newton’s conviction. He lost his seat in the 1979 general election and was put on trial (along with his ...”

“... can turn into an addiction. The connection between this and other kinds of abuse is something that Peter Rushforth has been thinking about for a long time. In 1979 he published his first novel, Kindergarten, a short and desolate work which won the Hawthornden Prize. A meditation on ‘Hansel and Gretel’, the grimmest of tales, Kindergarten describes a world ...”

“... interpretations of the period by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Steven Mullancy and Peter Stallybrass (among others) and a chapter on Othello. This is less a translation than a new study in its own right. One of the great virtues of Shakespeare’s Festive World is the scrupulous care with which its investigations are conducted. Arming himself ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings ...”

“... decency nor even polemical coherence: it is, in every way, a bad book. And it is a fascist book. Peter Alexander, in his biography, dismisses the charge that Campbell was a fascist as a ‘slur’: he was, says Alexander, merely a political simpleton. That’s true, certainly: but then, fascism is a simpleton’s politics, and Campbell took to it ...”

“... the exquisite bodhisattvas watching you on your way through reinforce the point the Eye was always keen to make, that post-imperial Britain is a sorry spectacle. Other cartoons on show, mostly familiar, come from dozens of the Eye’s contributors, including the superb Ed McLaghlan, Michael Heath (Great Bores of Today etc), Ken Pyne, whose National Association ...”

“... a furious letter back to Blair, who was in Tuscany, and this elicited an anxious phone call from Peter Mandelson trying to smooth things out. The main plan seemed to be to stop Margaret talking to the press. The spin doctors might as well have tried to stop the earth from turning on its axis. Margaret had begun to sense her power. Robin was being difficult ...”

“... infects one’s impressions of the biography. And Rex, like Charles, seems to have been far too keen to please dreadful people. He was the son of a builder and a vicar’s daughter (a social disjunction preserved in the children’s vocabulary – she was always ‘Mother’, he ‘Daddy’). He was a gifted child, and used his gifts to amuse in a gentle ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... two poets would you reckon was the more self-centred, fond of flowers, susceptible to hyphens, keen on using the word mother? Such are the questions that can spin off from too many hours spent browsing in the realms of the Concordance. It so happens that both Larkin and Eliot have lately had their works ‘concorded’* – that’s to say, worked over ...”

“... generations will lose the secret. The Manarrs have two children, Helena and Hugo. Helena marries Peter Koenig, son of the formidable Grandmother Koenig, who lives enshrined with her ancient German maid among massive furniture. Angel is Helena and Peter’s only child, a bespectacled little girl who has to endure the ordeal ...”

“... is what it costs these days to make England look like England. The show was created and written by Peter Morgan, its majesty and its wit are his – it would take an American ‘writers’ room’ of a dozen to do wrong what he does right – and a slew of British directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British settings ...”