“... that ‘the calamity of mediocre taste is worse than the calamity of tastelessness,’ it may seem that we are invited to take their vision ironically, a promise of a future that can’t be better than tepid. Just wishful thinking then, a fake rainbow. But the friends have been provoked in part by the text of the now dead Yuri Zhivago’s ...”

“... of in our house. My father liked to say: ‘I have no time for a man who cannot weep’ (he may have been quoting Churchill). At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my ...”

“... all around her, which turn out to be protective angels.As astonishing as Margery’s experiences may be to the modern reader, she was following a familiar script. She knew about the experiences of other mystics, including the celebrity saint Bridget of Sweden, and her divine visions echoed theirs. She may even have been ...”

“... of science is winners’ history. The last proponents of geocentric astronomy or phlogiston may no longer be dismissed as irrational or pigheaded, but their evidence and arguments receive considerably less attention from academics than those of their ultimately successful opponents. And almost no one suggests that the likes of Tycho Brahe or Joseph ...”

“... him keep appearing: literary and philosophical essays by Jean-Claude Milner (2003), Jean-Pierre Richard (2006) and Eric Marty (2006), a gossipy biography of his last years by Hervé Algalarrondo (2006), a chapter about his piano-playing by François Noudelmann (2008). And now we have two new/old texts by Barthes himself, transcriptions of his notes on the ...”

“... but developed its own distinct identity as a province of its empire.’ Virgil would be delighted. Richard Hingley’s book deals with the troublesome process of uncovering Roman Britain. This is difficult territory. He explores how, between 1586 (the date of William Camden’s Britannia) and 1906 (when Francis Haverfield’s lecture on ‘The Romanisation of ...”

“... of the earliest letters, written when Gabriel was seven, records his ‘reading Shakespeare’s Richard the 3rd for my amusement . . . I, Maria, and William know several scenes by heart. I have bought a picture of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... letters. The postman always announced his presence with a ‘burst of prophetic whistling’. In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed ...”

“... is perhaps the last of his judgments on himself. This is said to be an autobiographical novel, and Richard Lourie, in his introduction, calls it ‘the culmination of everything he has so far written’, but it strikes me more as an elegy, a jazz elegy in five movements, of which three are very much more important than the others. Like Ratushinskaya, Sinyavsky ...”

“... pot never boils’. No one can wholly avoid hating ‘Old Daddy Franklin’, from whose Poor Richard’s Almanac these sayings come, especially if brought up to revere him in Public School, USA. Abraham Lincoln is the father of his people; George Washington, of his nation; but Benjamin Franklin – as it happens, a basically very decent man – hovers ...”

“... afterwards that she becomes Lessing enough to blame people for thinking Somers is not her: Some may think this is a detached way to write about Doris Lessing, as if I were not she, it is the name I am detached about. After all, it is the third name I’ve had: the first, Tayler, being my father’s; the second, Wisdom (now try that one on for size!), my ...”

“... people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media intelligentsia and ...”

“... embodied the restless, forward movements of his era, ‘the spirit of the age’. In his new book Richard Jay has explained how and why this happened. There have been several biographies and studies of Chamberlain, but this is the best analysis of the public man, finely wrought and exact, and undoubtedly demanding of the reader. Old politics can be very stale ...”

“... and further in the labs, using mirrors in interiors to reflect sunlight as a sole source ... There may be a small queue of cinematographers shuffling forward now with hands raised to claim equal credit in these endeavours. What is true is that Almendros used the methods as thoroughly and successfully as anyone, and was bold about applying them in major ...”