“... came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a clash between an Old Britain personified by Mr Worsthorne and a New Britain exemplified by the man Private Eye calls ...”

“... series of mergers which transformed the firm, the Routledge and Kegan Paul archive, dating back to George Routledge’s ‘railway library’ in the mid-19th century and coming forward to Wittgenstein, was deposited, on ‘permanent loan’, at nearby UCL. The Penguin and Hamish Hamilton archives are, substantially, on loan at Bristol University library, in ...”

“... families, living semi-independent lives, travelling in helicopters and going on as if they were George Best in oilskins.Forty years on, Tabitha Lasley was already working on a book about oil-rig workers when she first visited Aberdeen. She’d recently broken up with her boyfriend, a pothead in public relations. He’d had his uses, though, teaching her how ...”

“... than two-thirds of the way through the novel the reader accompanies the surgeon and photographer George Hardy on a journey past the Bosphorus, accompanied by a sister called Myrtle, a lapsed geologist, Dr Potter, and a Mrs Yardley. With gnats flying about their heads they ride into a wood: We rode in single file and shortly passed two young ...”

“... cradle? Did the conflict that Washington calls the Persian Gulf War end on 28 February 1991 when George H.W. Bush declared a unilateral ceasefire? Or did that ceasefire signify little more than a pause in a conflict with Iraq that would, in the end, persist for another twenty years? The answers to these questions not only determine the duration of those two ...”

“... Tanna in the New Hebrides in 1774 (‘I went ashore, we shot a new pigeon’), painted by his son George, and never seen again. Like parrots, doves and pigeons seem to have suffered disproportionately more extinctions than other birds, though there is nothing obvious about their biology to explain this. Indeed, two of the most famous pigeon extinctions ...”

“... stuck in France is unclear, and their identity is uncertain. But their names are usually given as George and Lady Mary Hamilton. The daughter appears to have been Sophia St John Hamilton. Just then Foscolo was brushing up his English by reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which he later translated into Italian. The Hamiltons’ dashing and accommodating ...”

“... been discounted it wouldn’t have made any difference: the new Conservative MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, would just have been elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450. Hunter won’t be seeking re-election in May, having seen his majority – which peaked in 1992 at 21,198, making Basingstoke an apparently unassailable Tory stronghold ...”

“... Announcing the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, Andrew Marr was pleased to be able to say that none of the shortlisted books was the obvious result of a publisher’s ‘wheeze’, or the so-called biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life. One of the more glaring recent additions to the latter category is Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography by Dominic Streatfeild (Virgin, £20 ...”

“... was spoken on a wet night in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s son, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, artillery officer on the Western Front, faultless husband and devoted father of three, was on a lecture tour, trying to raise money for the forthcoming all-British attempt (his third) on ...”

“... Wyndham, Lady Elcho. May’s brother Alfred was appointed Colonial Secretary, and Mary’s brother George was brought into the Cabinet. Under Balfour, one of his ministers observed, ‘cabinets degenerated into cliquey conversations between “Arthur” and “Bob” and “George”.’ In spite of all these ties of blood ...”

“... In a notebook entry written during the summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice of the Law ... has an extraordinary Genius in drawing and painting Landskips, equal if not superior in some degree to any painter in England ...”

“... of enemies. Educated liberals, especially, accused him of lowering the tone of national debate. George Gissing was levelling this charge even before the Mail was founded. Once its anti-German campaign started, many claimed that it was making foreign tensions worse. Northcliffe has never ceased to be an object of fascination; fourteen books about him had ...”

“... boys were grown up, he got lonely; simple as that.’ At other times P.G. Wodehouse takes over. George Mitchell is ‘an immensely shrewd and capable wise oldish bird’; Bill Clinton was ‘a total brick throughout’; Derry Irvine ‘has a brain the size of a melon’. People are ‘of that ilk’ and can be found with ‘their faces grimacing as if a ...”

“... itself. The admission of rival sentiments comes to appear merely a nuance of the mind’s habit. Andrew Motion’s way of making sense is to imagine something, then something else apparently quite different, and let the poem accommodate both imaginings with or without specifying the relation between them. A girl and her father, quarrelling; the girl and a ...”