“... of the Baroness Dunn. Henry (‘Taipan’) Keswick and the now ex-ministerial but ever-amusing Richard Needham are fellow-guests. A heated disagreement between them about Chris Patten’s governorship of Hong Kong flares up and amicably subsides. Entirely by chance, we meet the Pattens in London the very next evening for the first time since long before ...”

“... Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of ...”

“... a documentary realism, or a theatre of facts, that would upset the drawing-room culture of English drama. Storey had enormous success, but, for all of it, there was a psychological regress, the strong sense that he was not quite at work in the way that people who respected work should be. He had plays on Broadway and in the West End, but when he ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard Sugg is devoted. The belief that a wide range of maladies could be cured by the consumption of human remains – principally in the form of so-called ‘mummy’ – persisted in Europe for at least six centuries. Although the administration of such ...”

“... a strong and highly specific racial and national identity with a quite general human sympathy. Richard Wollheim’s essay,‘The Idea of a Common Human Nature’, is illuminating on several of these topics. Wollheim also makes the point that Berlin’s interest in the observable features of life, and his diffidence about claims to have discovered ...”

“... Emerson’s poems, Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (‘What piffle!’). Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an ...”

“... spirit left to be broken. All this we should have known long ago. Think of the career of the great Richard Topcliffe, chief ‘poursuivant’ or persecutor of Jesuit missionaries in the reign of Elizabeth I. Topcliffe is perhaps not much spoken of except by historians of the Catholic martyrs or close students of Donne, who mentioned him in passing but deleted ...”

“... creditable. And here figure Mairi MacInnes, Miriam Levine (two), Gerry Loose, Paul Coltman, Richard Dankleff, Robin Ivy, Pete Morgan (two), Phyllis Koestenbaum, Barbara Moore, David MacSweeney (one out of two), Randall Garrison, Donald Stallybrass, Ellery Akers, Peter Abbs, John Hodgen, Andrew Motion, Edwin Drummond, Gregory Harrison, Gordon Mason and ...”

“... some of the real issues involved. ‘Without a doubt what had occurred to Liffey had occurred to Richard too – that once a wife is financially dependent, she is sexually dependent too.’ This is an issue that gets so far as to be formulated, but – in a context that includes puffballs and black magic, and another woman who cries into her typewriter, and ...”

“... Here not only the meaning of the term but also the influence of the policy is suggested. See Richard Cobden. This leads us to the Anti-Corn Law League, and in turn to John Bright. With Bright we can choose to go back to the League or, reading to the end of the entry, on to the Second Reform Bill (‘His subsequent career was a failure’). The entry on ...”

“... is anti-Toto. Americans can be indifferent to dogs, in representation or in the street – not the English. ‘Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug!’ He doesn’t like Glinda, the Good Witch, either; the Wicked Witch of the West receives his appreciative notice. This is the old, perhaps oldest, story: that of Satan ...”

“... of England, one of four children of a ‘critic’ and a mother who goes on to take a degree in English and become an admired poet. Her parents split up; both eventually remarry. ‘Jane’, like the real Jane, grows up in Brixton, goes to Oxford, and later works in publishing (for an unnamed but unmistakable Faber, down to the Kundera lookalike ...”

“... No essay in English has a better title than De Quincey’s ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’. I wonder whether, if he were alive today, he might be tempted to go back to the well and write a follow-up, ‘On Financial Disaster Considered as One of the Fine Arts’? The basic material might be less immediately captivating, but there’s a lot to choose from ...”

“... At least I assume this is the case, since we hear enough about it. The book is constructed in the Richard Rogers style, with all the functional background stuff displayed ostentatiously on the outside. There is a Thirlwellesque narrator, a writer who lives in East London, drinks a lot of coffee, and has recently ‘got back into the practice of dope’. He ...”