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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who replaced Iain McNicol as general secretary under Corbyn, has now been replaced by David Evans, a figure popular on the Labour right.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who gets such a clue into the title of a book, as does Agatha Christie in Why didn’t they ask Evans? And it is Agatha Christie, too, who regularly contrives that just as the clue is dropped a distracting incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage conjurer: a point well made by Robert Barnard in his concise and extremely acute ...”

“... strategists did not fear the Russian conquest of India – the army officer George de Lacy Evans half-admitted as much in On the Designs of Russia (1828), Russophobia’s foundational text. His concern was that increasing Russian activity beyond India’s borders would ‘disturb and disaffect the public mind of that country towards us’ and force the ...”

“... It is not so clear that the Titanic would have remained in the collective memory without the war. Richard Davenport-Hines quotes Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography, in which he says that at the time he thought it foreshadowed disaster. But he was writing more than thirty years later. Only a few weeks after the sinking Conrad wrote that in its ...”

“... his performance of Mozart’s Fantasia for piano, K 475, a piece of music that obsessed me. Then Richard Eyre, who had just moved from the Nottingham Playhouse to the BBC, asked me to write a television play and I abandoned the story. I thought that by distracting myself, by doing something completely different, I could come back refreshed to my non-existent ...”

“... effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the jury, that the Commander-in Chief’s Official Report on the Falklands War had been tampered with behind his back, in relation to the crucial timing of the contact between HMS ...”