“... on the belief that the word ‘history’ stood for ‘hiss-Tory’, but the recent work of Peter Clarke, for example, has shown how much these difficulties were part of the central experience of a generation. The other great refuge of liberal optimism, in 1914 as in 1867, was education. It is hard to read Russell On ...”

“... poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ‘Time Passing, Beloved’ and Gunn’s ‘On the Move’ in O’Brien) is to see how the Movement contains the germ of its own undoing in these restless and questing poets. In fact, the ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... Bletchley from Donald Michie, Professor of Robotology at Edinburgh University. Three years later I read Angus Calder’s The People’s War, a social history of World War Two, and resolved to write something one day about the war. I come from an Army background, and although I was born three years after the war ended, it was a living presence throughout my ...”

“... for all that discrepant genes may turn out to be equally implicated in all of them. People don’t read case-studies of diabetes in the hope of gaining some insight into the nature of man’s relationship with the world, even though extreme physical illness and pain may be quite as tumultuous and alienating to the individual as mental disturbance. Madness has ...”

“... just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA certificate, from which I learned, incidentally, that it was introduced in July 1970 and dropped in September 1982 to make way for the 15 certificate still in use ...”

“... appalled by the touch of a female. After a brisk march through the history of sainthood – from Peter and Paul to the Reformation in just ninety pages – Bartlett turns to a leisured exploration of liturgical commemoration, relics and shrines, pilgrimage, church dedications, personal and place names, images of the saints and literary genres, including ...”

“... the pages to find further references. Try ‘Cary Grant’ and see if you can manage not to read about Hawks, Hitchcock, Hepburn, Mae West, Capra; except that having got to the Hawks entry, you are deflected on to Elisha Cook, Montgomery Clift, Boris Karloff, and each of those will send you off on another mystery tour … I have spent whole days leafing ...”

“... however, as one of the few prominent Pop and high-tech buildings to see the light of day, it was read as a manifesto. First, it made clear the renewed importance of innovative engineering for contemporary architecture (Rogers and Piano were assisted by the great engineer Peter Rice, who often consulted for RRP ...”

“... testimony, power seldom looks alluring. The distended egos of New Labour grandees such as Peter Mandelson, and especially Prescott, float by from time to time, gas-filled blimps at risk of collision or spontaneous combustion. Mandy, prickly, imperious and unloved, falls, twice. Gordon Brown schemes to become leader, while his faction intrigues against ...”

“... that the text disappeared beneath the interpretation.’By contrast, the great merit of Peter McPhee’s new synthesis is the weight it gives to the earthy, even mundane, aspects of revolutionary experience. It examines 1789 from the peripheries, rather than Paris, as seen through the eyes of the menu peuple, rather than from the heights of the ...”

“... deeply confused about his sexuality, and at least part of his appeal to the teenage Ashbery, who read the New Directions edition of Poems not long after it was published in the US in 1941, was the combination of modernist obliquity and homoerotic undertones. ‘To a Man on His Horse’ and ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ (whose original title, ‘A Muse ...”

“... from the dead. Mein Kampf, Knausgaard says, is ‘literature’s only unmentionable work’. To read it is to travel into a forbidden zone. What Knausgaard finds when he breaches the taboo is a crumpled, Hitler-shaped image of himself. The hated father, the beloved mother, the fear of intimacy, the sense of outsiderhood and the ponderous seriousness with ...”

“... Chamberlains, who live in Washington Square West, are recent transplants from New York City. Peter, a fortysomething local news anchor and Alix, a 33-year-old writer and Instagram influencer, are parents to Catherine, a newborn, and Briar, an inquisitive three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of ...”