“... another factor, which Mortimer is the first biographer to be able to take into account. In 1998, Michael Bennett revealed that a badly burned charter in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and ...”

“... Web’, which claims that language waters down the child’s vivid apprehension of roses, the ‘black wastes of evening sky’ and the drumming of soldiers. But if we try to get back behind it, Facing the wide glare of the children’s day, Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums, We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.The repetition makes the ...”

“... of a family name such as Bellegueule is a challenge to even the most skilful translator. Michael Lucey opts for ‘Prettymug’, which is as close as English gets: a man with ‘une belle gueule’ tends to be rugged and macho, while one with ‘un beau visage’ is handsome in a more standard fashion. When combined with Eddy (very much not ...”

“... a long lyric mist’. And a woman serving a long prison sentence prays: She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn’t know that the name for this is Prisoner’s Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious ...”

“... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...”

“... he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere friendship. Faithfully, he paints in the warts alongside the beauty spots. And, God knows, there were plenty of warts. Some were simple bad manners, such as ...”

“... a ‘writer’. Nor of an honnête homme. Waugh hit back by mocking Priestley’s war-time novel, Black-Out in Gretley, with its all-pull-together message and its shrewd and well-informed insistence that the Establishment and the upper-class were in many cases less than reliable and well-intentioned. Good novels, it is true, rarely endorse right thinking. But ...”

“... Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be solemn, formal and frontal, the palms of the hands ...”

“... in politics’: how many aspirants for power – most recently Silvio Berlusconi, Ross Perot and Michael Heseltine – have traded under that description. On the basis of a successful business record, they have claimed to be equipped to perform startling political feats – cutting through red tape, banging heads together, turning the country round, getting ...”

“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a ...”

“... surveys of books that are unjustly out of print. And Sacheverell still holds his surprise niche in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... little time for the activities of his mother. Another investigation of the Queen of Scots, that by Michael Lynch and his team, is not aimed at the general reader, for it assumes a firm grasp of the main events of her life. It explores areas of less common interest: her court, her library, her use of her French jointure, her policy towards the house of ...”

“... however, that we are ‘now moving back to the middle’. He means that we are moving way from Michael Portillo’s pompously ignorant remarks a few days ago when he gave his Israeli hosts carte blanche to do what they liked in Lebanon. I ask with a touch of acrimony why we ever left ‘the middle’ and ring off. On the plane, I read Auden and ...”

“... at war. This was felt at every level, from the murder of two first cousins and the memory of the Black and Tans hammering on the door to the misery of living in grey corporation housing during Jim’s internment. Their uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters were IRA activists, many of them high up in the organisation; Eileen’s brother Jack Lynch was the ...”