“... the reverend submitted insurance claims on his nephew to the Beneficial National, the Vulcan, the John Hancock and the World Wide insurance companies. The reverend, who was black, was assisted in his macabre actuarial pursuits, as well as in his legal battles, by a white lawyer called Tom Radney. Exploiting the vulnerabilities of an insurance industry that in ...”

“... shut behind her. Such, more or less, is the story of Ida Nettleship, the first wife of Augustus John, who died of puerperal fever at the age of 30 in 1907 and was soon lost to view. In John’s unfinished mural Lyric Fantasy, painted soon after her death, Ida stands to one side of the group of women and children who make ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... thinking that something really foreign was happening on one of these family holidays was when we took shelter in a little café-cum-shop somewhere in North Wales and all the other customers were talking in a language I couldn’t understand. Although quite gratified in retrospect by this evidence of authentically local culture, my parents were clearly made ...”

“... Straying Student’, to a knottier and more derisive manifestation of the same drive (though it took him 17 years to get together a volume of poetry in the new mode – Ancient Lights came out in 1955, while 1938 was the date of its predecessor Night and Morning). Social criticism: this is one of the two major preoccupations of Irish writers in the 20th ...”

“... of others, particularly Edith’s. Not only was Robert Bulwer-Lytton a philanderer who publicly took up with an American actress but he messed up his financial affairs and left his wife with inadequate funds for the upkeep of Knebworth House, the family estate, after his death. From 1901, she and Edith lived together at Homewood, a draughty house far more ...”

“... If they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings ...”

“... produced a very good sub-Dada movie, entitled Groundhog Day, and starring Bill Murray, which took the piss out of the repetitious and the banal by capturing the star in a time-warp where he was doomed to enact the same day over and over again until he could learn to act his way out of it. Other smart films have been made on dumb subjects, or about ...”

“... his own intellectual needs in mind. Like many heavy readers he loved detective stories, but he took them seriously, prefixing to his essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ a heavy Pauline epigraph: ‘I had not known sin, but by the law.’ He always had gurus – Gerald Heard, Charles Williams, Georg Groddeck, Homer Lane. Some quietly faded away, but with a few ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... for the resolution of ambiguities or archaisms or doctrinal obscurities, and interpretation often took the form of amended or interpolated narrative. A well-known example is the early Christian interpretation of the Messianic prophecies of Isaiah, and the way so much that happens in the gospels is said to be ‘according to the Scriptures’. James Kugel, in ...”

“... I felt in those days during the opening scene of Official Secrets, which stars Keira Knightley. (I took a perverse liking to her when it was unfashionable to, around the time of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie; and I have somehow ended up as a true fan, an opening weekend Keira completist.) The movie starts in February 2003, with Keira as the once and ...”

“... vulgar vastness of Blackpool, as the whole of Northern England arrives to see the Lights. Labour took the third slot, also at Blackpool, and the Conservatives brought matters to a close, at Bournemouth, well into October. There was a time, long ago, when lesser resorts like Margate, Scarborough and Llandudno were on the Conference circuit. But for many years ...”

“... that can be avoided by learning some lessons from the past. The salient facts were simple enough. John Profumo, then Minister for War, had a brief affair with Christine Keeler, a chum of Rice-Davies’s. Unbeknown to him, she had also been to bed (or so she later said) with one Eugene Ivanov, then a Soviet naval attaché in London. Profumo had met Keeler ...”

“... Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the ...”