“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... in a sonnet as ‘un positivo padre azafranado’, or ‘an intransigent ginger Jesuit’, as John Dent-Young translates it in his new bilingual Selected Poems. The taint of immorality has long been forgotten, but Góngora’s work has never quite recovered from another accusation: that it is incomprehensible. He was born of a noble family in Córdoba in ...”

“... its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present America.’ This was John Updike in 1961, saying of J.D. Salinger what critics since have been saying of John Updike: that here is a novelist uncannily responsive to the ‘personality’, if we can use the word, of his own culture. Updike, it has ...”

“... metropolitan art-and-journalism. The title is allegorical and so is the name of the painter, John Worth. The title is also the name of Worth’s controversial new picture, in which he depicts Jesus with a skinhead haircut, standing on the pillion of a motorbike, congratulating himself like a football hero, while the fans rip off branches from ornamental ...”

“... was promoted to uniform sergeant; he was then promoted to detective sergeant and posted to Baker Street, where he established a new unit, which quickly became known as the ‘anti-mugging squad’.In 1978, Stuart Hall wrote in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order of the emergence of a new word – ‘mugging’ – which was used ...”

“... he said. ‘The police commandos arrested 15 people from here last night including the local baker. I am sitting here in my house with a Kalashnikov and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many ...”

“... such as Michael Portillo and Peter Lilley and a strange breed of suburban Brylcreem boys – John Moore, Kenneth Baker, Jeffrey Archer and, pre-eminently, Cecil Parkinson. What they have in common is a dreadful smarminess, a smoothly blatant insincerity which apparently nothing can puncture – ...”

“... is a professor of theological ethics at Duke. Also cited as symptomatic of the times was Houston Baker’s cryptic remark that choosing between authors like Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck ‘is like choosing between a hoagy and a pizza. I am one whose career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards.’ ...”

“... first word in asking for food had been bekos, which was deemed near enough to the Dutch for baker to prove the point.) Scaliger’s attack on this ‘fever-brained’ writer spilled over into his commentary on Manilius, and helped to turn his thoughts in the direction of a new project, the writing of what was to be his most famous book, De emendatione ...”

“... so behind them did two large, electronically sophisticated wholesalers, Ingram Book Company and Baker & Taylor. As Laura Miller notes, these wholesalers’ speed and reliability of delivery ‘rationalised book distribution by enabling booksellers to implement a “just in time” strategy’.* The cultural tone of the mall book-chains, and the wholesalers ...”

“... then comes Herbert Chitepo, named after an African leader martyred in the struggle. To the south, Baker and Speke intrude between Samora Machel and Mugabe. Since those two famous explorers never came anywhere near the territory formerly known as Southern Rhodesia, their continued invocation in the centre of decolonised Harare is remarkable testimony to the ...”

“... All her life, she seemed curiously fixed in childhood. In December 1957, Marianne met Lt Col John Kelly while working as an interpreter for the US Army, and they were married exactly a year later. On 25 May 1959, Petra’s half-sister was born and named Grace Patricia after the Princess of Monaco. Soon afterwards, ...”

“... because of his opposition to the despatch of the Falklands task force. Much of the anger in John Silkin’s posthumously published book is directed against Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Labour’s internal wars of the late Seventies are refought here, culminating in the 1981 election for the Party’s deputy leadership, in which Silkin stood as standard-bearer ...”

“... approach the subject from varying angles, and not all of them approach very close. Malcolm Baker writes on tomb sculpture, ‘the static intermediary between the earthly and the eternal’, where the stone figure of the Commendatore is undeniably a case in point. Peter Gay explores the opera’s ‘hidden agenda’, long ago exposed to the light of ...”

“... organiser of Women’s Institutes and Country Women’s Organisations, and a decorous affair with John Pentland, grandson of Lord Aberdeen: ‘I can’t give him all with abandon and urgent desire.’ A hundred and fifty pages of schoolgirlish sentiments and solemnities (‘work is the only only only remedy for life’) is more than enough, and it is a relief ...”