“... End. On the strength of it, he was later asked by Truth to review a book about the case of Timothy Evans, hanged after his wife and baby daughter had been found murdered at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the ...”

“... true celebrity ‘delivers’. He or she keeps weaving and moving in an effort not to disappoint. Richard Nixon was such a one. Every time a new segment of Watergate tape was released, revealing his Jew-baiting or thuggery or corruption, he would publish a new book on grand strategy or at least fly to Beijing. What a trouper! Such a pro! Say what you like ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... who replaced Iain McNicol as general secretary under Corbyn, has now been replaced by David Evans, a figure popular on the Labour right. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the left’s candidate to replace Corbyn, has already been sacked from the shadow cabinet. The party’s National Executive Committee has a majority defined ostensibly by loyalty to Starmer, but ...”

“... publishing (for an unnamed but unmistakable Faber, down to the Kundera lookalike chairman, Matthew Evans). After ten or fifteen years, she leaves London and moves to Devon with her daughter, where she begins to write. As Lowell said, ‘Why not say what happened?’ Or, from this book, a nod at Knausgaard: ‘What’s the point in making things up? the ...”

“... humility, and varying tensions between private and public religious experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later ...”

“... rest away. Plum-picking explains why Dickens’s dealings with Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans have survived, while the bulk of their papers have disappeared (some B&E materials washed up in the Punch archive; those of C&H were, apparently, thrown out when the firm was taken over by Methuen in 1938). Only after 1945 did large libraries become ...”

“... a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a Stratford businessman called Richard Quiney. From here, on 25 October 1598, Quiney wrote a short letter addressed on the verso ‘To my Loveinge good ffrend & contreymann Mr Wm Shackespere’ – the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive. It is a request for a loan of ...”

“... the excuse for Tory austerity, itself an excuse for dismantling the state. And, as Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley argue in their formidably well-evidenced The New Politics of Class, New Labour’s decision to stop talking about the ‘working-class’ marginalised millions of people.2 It isn’t that class ceased to exist, or that people ceased to ...”

“... one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad moment outside Swan and Edgar’s. Richard Ellmann’s biography says that, as Wilde caught sight of ‘the painted boys on the pavement’ outside the department store, he was struck by an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. Holland traces the story back to 1930 and to Ada Leverson, who – he ...”

“... Telegraph – William Deedes, on whom Evelyn Waugh modelled William Boot in Scoop, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who would make a career attacking the Clintons. Deedes and Evans-Pritchard’s way of covering the still-born convention was to hit the golf course. And it really did seem as if nothing much was going on. In ...”

“... novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and nastiness, vanity, callousness, lust for blood, but – like a French Impressionist – utter black is not a colour for him. Cobb is most moving and persuasive when he speaks of women and fugitives. ‘A deserter cannot ...”

“... her date of birth (1879 – she lopped a few years off her age) and identified her father as Richard T. Greener, a prominent civil rights activist who was also the first Black student to receive a bachelor’s degree from Harvard. (His waterlogged diploma, discovered in an attic in 2009, was displayed at the exhibition.) Heidi Ardizzone’s biography of ...”

“... by Marlowe. Soon after he had finished playing the title role in Edward II at the Swan, Daniel Evans directed a revival of Liz Duffy Adams’s Born with Teeth at Wyndham’s in the West End, with Ncuti Gatwa as Marlowe. First produced in Houston in 2022, Born with Teeth positions its Marlowe as the bad angel to a less worldly Shakespeare. Like other recent ...”

“... and are hunted down by the combined efforts of both police and local press – specifically Leon Evans, a success-hungry reporter on the Bristol Evening Herald, which has recently taken a plunge downmarket under the influence of its new editor. Finally Sue and Teresa are brought to trial and Leon gets his comeuppance by hounding them so obsessively that he ...”