“... was two years from the signing of the Agreement, a period subsequently defined as ending in May 2000 – but no date was specified for starting the process. By contrast, the Executive was to be set up quite quickly. The Unionists were bound to be displeased with this interpretation of the timing of events. Some were not prepared to accept the absence of ...”

“... desire for unattainable precision and curious universal truths is also a Romantic trait, and it may be that some of the more ambitious forms of modern literary criticism will come to be seen as a late flowering of the Romantic spirit. When the various definitions are brought together, they tend to suggest that the Romantics were writers and artists who knew ...”

“... Armstrong’s pre-cancer physique probably had something to do with steroids, and the steroids may or may not have contributed to his getting cancer: we can’t know. In a conversation with his doctors during his cancer treatment that Armstrong now denies ever took place, but which two friends who were in the room at the ...”

“... wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS. As Pym’s diary records, they had kipper pâté to start, after sherry; and then ‘veal done with peppers and tomatoes, Pommes ...”

“... and from old materials thrown hurriedly together without a due attempt to ascertain what they may have lost of their value from age.’ The Shell Guide is not altogether in that category, although it is not much of a recommendation for the author to claim that he has relied in part on ‘books written by two magnificent Victorians, Edward Walford and ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus in ...”

“... long timescale of global warming has often made it hard to mobilise a majority against damage that may occur decades, or even generations, in the future. That timescale no longer looks quite so distended, after the last few years of serial disaster – fire, storm and flood – but air pollution provides an even more urgent motive for change: millions are ...”

“... spared the worst effects of winter. But, as with depopulation, we are getting a glimpse of what may be to come. South Korea serves as a demographic warning to the rest of the world, in the way that, say, the Maldives does for climate change. These are the places where we can see what will happen if and when the waters close over our heads.Depopulation is at ...”

“... Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such ...”

“... would not have been welcome even if he had delivered it on time, in person and in sobriety, and may have been devised to sting the austere, abstemious Liliane.On one gala occasion Ramón and Liliane failed their children simultaneously. At the Comédie-Française on 16 April 1942, during the interval of Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, Dominique was looking ...”

“... the Confessor and the Elder literally felt not to count – even though the latter’s mark may still be visible on the shire system of Central England. As for the Egberts and Oswigs and Cerdics, the incompetences of modern spelling have left them all unpronounceable, vaguely ludicrous. To this general picture of neglect and oblivion there is one ...”

“... the art of the 19th century to the society that created it. Boime’s belief that painting between David and the Impressionists reflected the political and social problems of a century divided between liberty and constraint leads him to describe a large part of French art (and music, literature and philosophy) as the product of a juste-milieu, stuck like ...”

“... memory of another but of a nation stooping under the power of its looming next-door neighbour. It may be appropriate for the state capitols of California or Mississippi to defer to the shape of the US Capitol, but Cuba is not a state of the Union. On the cover of my mother’s civics book, the Cuban Capitolio represented an ideal of democracy modelled on the ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an ...”