“... or more candidly offered as offcuts of authorial wisdom. Either way, it doesn’t strike home with much effect because – although often unexceptionable – it lacks intellectual force and doesn’t seem hard-won. Blake is meant to be a significant presence in A Bottle in the Smoke, both as a poet and as the subject of Gilchrist’s Life, and his ...”

“... in the wrong kind of certainties. British history – declining abroad and under pressure at home – is no exception. How useful then to be reminded by these books that the study of history, like humanity itself, is chiefly valuable for its diversity. The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians edited by John Cannon is a splendid work which, even in these ...”

“... last decade, and Mrs Midgley is trying to restore a sense of proportion. Sociobiology has had its home principally in the United States rather than in the land of Herbert Spencer, and Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard, author of Sociobiology the New Synthesis, is now the leading figure in this new, or revived, philosophy of human nature. The founding father ...”

“... remorse, she is involved in a railway accident and left for dead. She then returns to her former home, unrecognisable because of a scarred mouth, a sorrow-stricken air and blue spectacles, and acts as governess to her own children. Her son dies without knowing who she really is (her expression of understandable agitation, ‘Dead! dead! And never called me ...”

“... rapidly in the next two years than in the last two. So far, however, this constituency has had no home to go to. The Labour Party has alienated it, but although enough of it voted Conservative at the last election to put Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street, it is not Conservative by nature and the Conservatives are unlikely to win many votes from it in 1983 or ...”

“... fed briefings about the sorry state of affairs. The SDR, titled ‘Making Britain Safer: Secure at Home, Strong Abroad’, was submitted to the cabinet in March, but its publication was delayed for months by internal squabbling, both among the armed services and between the general staff and the cabinet. Before the review was launched, the government had ...”

“... was the essential landscape of the nation for which so many had fallen, and now the tanks had come home to blast it to pieces. At the centre of this dispute stood Herbert Weld-Blundell, a man with some claims to fame as an archaeologist, explorer and big game hunter. In 1922, he was still re-assembling Lulworth, buying portraits of his forebears from London ...”

“... presses into the domain of contemporary verse have contributed), no reader could possibly feel at home within even this single subset of the literary world. Contemporary American poetry, if often dismissed as peripheral by most contemporary American readers, turns out, paradoxically, to be a far larger phenomenon than ever. In terms of the individual ...”

“... may help us towards the notion of irrelevance as consolation, and of metaphor as the long way home. Bird at first assumes the child will die within days, encouraged by doctors who are even more full of shame than he is. Unexpectedly, the Director’s thick eyelids reddened and he burst into a childish giggle. Bird had sensed a suspicious presence lurking ...”

“... countless volumes of history, as well as accounts of his adventures in the great outdoors, at home and abroad. He read voraciously in several languages: multi-volume histories of Rome, Britain, France and other Empires, as well as Euripides and Shakespeare, long passages of which he could quote from memory. A man of action who loved the limelight, he ...”

“... is almost routinely (and quite legitimately) expected to span the story of both the British at home and the British diaspora. In addition, investigating the British imperial past is widely viewed as useful for the present of the United States. At one level, it casts light on, while also perhaps distracting attention from, the role of imperialism in ...”

“... Such medical imagery came easily to a political class confounded by two decades of dissension at home and defeat abroad. In seeking an explanation for the ills that afflicted the body politic, contemporaries looked naturally to the health of its head, the King. At the time York spoke, Henry VI’s physical and mental state had already been causing concern ...”

“... in jail, but she was with a friend who was hoping to find her missing daughter. Letts’s suburban home isn’t far from the stretch of East Hastings Street in Downtown Eastside populated by fentanyl users who live on the street, their possessions strewn around them. ‘Searching for our kids is just something we do,’ Letts told me. In the OPS, people were ...”

“... finds herself in a brothel. She finds kindness on the street and abuse in the highest places. The lord high almoner, Bishop Sherlock, ‘fat and carbuncled, his face “all Knobs and Flames of Fire”’, rejects her plea for royal charity, calling her a foreigner (a claim she disputes, retorting that Ireland was ‘equally a Part of his Majesty’s Dominions ...”

“... that Douglas Hogg claimed for cleaning out his moat. The papers are suddenly full of pictures of Home Counties mansions set in acres of manicured lawns, straight out of Country Life, allegedly maintained at taxpayers’ expense. Proof, in case anyone has forgotten, that the class divide is alive and well. A reporter from the BBC has even had fun touring the ...”