“... about all this, but it was all part of the atmosphere. AH: Where was the office? FW: Just off St James’s, Park Place or something. Very pretty, a very old rickety building, with one lavatory, and a funny person who lived at the top. And then all the writs began arriving. Verschoyle wasn’t a shy man, but he couldn’t tell anybody. In some mysterious way ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most ...”

“... to wallow in self-pity. Boston’s Irish were not alone in their resentments. Martin Luther King was pelted with bricks when he led marches in Chicago’s Polish and Lithuanian enclaves during the summer of 1966. Throughout the 1970s, Italians in Brooklyn fiercely defended their turf from blacks. And in 1972, whites in Pontiac, Michigan, a blue-collar ...”

“... nothing of the promised gift. The little scene sounds like a parodic reminiscence of the scene in King Lear when Goneril and Regan reduce Lear’s retinue from 100 knights to none. The citation of a great many forgotten novels from which Austen probably learned something, the demonstration that she familiarised herself with ‘the disinheritance novel’ as a ...”

“... of his household servants. K.K.’s world is ‘as measured and as concentric as that of the Sun King at Versailles’, his old age passing in ritual rounds of visits, bridge games, whisky drinking, walks taken in the garden for his health. His implacable confidence in his own importance makes him almost passive, and he’ll do anything to avoid ...”

“... parachute that had failed.’ In September 1942, however, the real corpse of Paymaster Lieutenant James Turner, ‘with despatches in his pockets’, turned up in Spanish waters when his RAF seaplane crashed. The Spanish authorities, despite the Falangist government’s debt to the Axis for aiding its victory in the civil war, returned the body to the British ...”

“... who seems to have been as introverted, ironical and critical as her husband; their friend Henry James thought her ‘a perfect Voltaire in petticoats’. Her main enthusiasm was photography, but she went to great lengths to avoid any record being made of her face. There is no mention of her or their (childless) married life in the Education, and Clover ...”

“... one of the more striking endpoints for thousands of prints. Grangerising took its name from James Granger’s A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, Consisting of Characters Disposed in Different Classes (1769). By taxonomising history into ‘a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads’, with blank leaves ...”

“... account of the siege of Derry. In the winter of 1688 the Catholic forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was ...”

“... so at times; in 2014, Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick Cheney, published a respectable biography of James Madison. Still, there’s a lurking suspicion that the public interest in the lives of dead white patriarchs is predominantly hagiographical.Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is an unobtrusively subversive contribution to the ...”

“... and military careers. The editor and translator of Llyfr Belgywryd (the Law Book of the Welsh King Hywel the Good), the author of the Lexicon to Herodotus, of a massive history of The House of Lords in the Middle Ages, of a short life of Joseph Chamberlain, and of the major work on the reinterpretation of the New Testament on which he is presently ...”

“... we should express no opinion on this issue, and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction. Even as the latest in ‘smart’ technology grinds and punctures the Iraqi military, this amazingly explicit enticement to Saddam is still being debated. Did the United States intend ...”

“... a son brought him a measure of personal fulfilment. It was the proprietor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, who had the idea of sending him to Africa to find Livingstone (and was for ever after intensely jealous of the glory he achieved). The rest, as they say, is history. After the Livingstone episode came the most extraordinary of all feats of ...”

“... idea of the modern epoch as the end of civilisation persisted until the Eighties in the work of James Joyce’s former amanuensis, Samuel Beckett. It is implicit indeed in the title of his play, Endgame. The work – today unfashionable – which seemed to authenticate this vision was Spengler’s Decline of the West. Our generation of writers was, very ...”

“... arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her 21st birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot and the redoubtable Brontë sisters. There were a ...”