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“... could be found on wet lunchtimes in the Lit and Phil, where reporters were allowed to use the reading room. Basil’s father read Wordsworth to his son and took the boy climbing in the Lake District. The family was deeply involved in the musical culture of Newcastle and Basil was a trained chorister who considered a professional career in music. This ...”

“... Before I went to Westminster I lived entirely in books and the past. I looked forward to reading Virgil and Pope and finding someone to talk to about Medieval coins, which I collected avidly. That is what I meant by saying that I was a prig. The interests of the boys I found myself among seemed confined to games, bullying and sex. I was, quite ...”

“... between a mature applicant and his MI5 selection board in 1981. ‘Have you any objection to reading other people’s mail?’ he was asked – suggesting that the old prejudice was still alive in some quarters. ‘What did the Board think I had been doing for the past 20 odd years!’ the applicant wondered. Those 20-odd years had been spent in the ...”

“... uncannily like one of those advent-calendar mobiles they used to make out of coat-hangers on Blue Peter. That’s how it goes with structures of occult significance. Phenomena which seem loaded with brooding horror by evening have a funny way of looking limp, harmless and rather foolish by the rising light of day. In one section of the novel – Book II to be ...”

“... as yet of Aristotle and Plato (as indeed of Mahomet) is no doubt purely temporary. But, on any reading of the concept of authority, it is a little surprising to find Godwin and Herzen figuring in the initial list of Masters. Here perhaps the editor’s well-founded appreciation of his authors mildly distorts the balance of his judgment of what such a ...”

“... slow history of how the European aristocracy finally learned to behave in an aristocratic way. Peter Burke treats The Book of the Courtier as an ‘open text’, whose dialogue form and apparent tensions and contradictions may reflect its author’s refusal to offer a simple moral, as well as the long time that he spent at work on it and the changes in his ...”

“... youth hauled from the pit. (A long-haired sacrificial male god straight out of The Ballad of Reading Gaol.) Each element is made to vibrate against its contrary. Binding’s narratives, carefully sited, happen just beyond the pull of the metropolitan force field, on the other side of J.G. Ballard’s mythical perimeter fence. Market or maritime towns ...”

“... Diana Spencer.The latter prompts Tina Brown to remark: ‘What a pity that the queen, so gifted at reading the bloodlines of horses, misread so profoundly the Spencers’ suitability to join with royal stock. Yes, in terms of pedigree, they were flawless.’ Ah, the paramountcy of stock! The glamour of pedigree! The duff studbook that the queen consulted might ...”

“... This book begins with real passion as Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw lash into those historians who they believe have made unwarranted assumptions about the links between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter ...”

“... Does Peter Lake​ ever sleep? Even at 666 pages this is not the longest of his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure ...”

“... a dozen biographies of Brando, or memoirs that depend on his presence. The weightiest of these is Peter Manso’s, published in 1994, when Brando still had ten years to live. (Mann hurries through those last years out of kindness as much as weariness. The killing of Drollet, the imprisonment of Christian and Cheyenne’s subsequent suicide left Brando a ...”

“... night’. The children – ten boys, two girls – had paper rounds, lessons in music and speed-reading, and were superb athletes. All the boys were altar boys. The eldest, Donald, was a football star, wrestling star, track star, a good-looking boy who dated a cheerleader. In 1965, as a student at Colorado State, he jumped into a bonfire – he couldn’t ...”

“... wrong?Puritans emerged from chaos. Luther’s wish that the laity act as their own priests, reading vernacular Bibles, bred contention not just between traditionalists and reformers but among the reformers themselves. Everyone had their own idea of what the new order should be. Some were content with modest alterations to the liturgy. Saints, for ...”

“... to ensure that their cables were never ‘flabby’ or ‘cute’. ‘Be strategically nasty,’ Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia, recommended.The publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of 250,000 US diplomatic cables (only 6 per cent of them classified as ‘secret’) was treated by the national security establishment and its helpmates as ...”

“... both Keir Starmer and his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, have endorsed a reading of Labour history in which the vital electoral triumphs are those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political ...”