“... a man’s riding clothes. She commissioned portraits of herself. But instead of patronising Sir Peter Lely, the artist favoured by Charles’s mistresses, Catherine patronised the Flemish (and Catholic) baroque painter Jacob Huysmans. In 1664, Huysmans portrayed her as her namesake, St Catherine of Alexandria. It is a work of serious, and ...”

“... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...”

“... voices of the victims, that is what it feels like too. Aids starts in the 1970s. Here’s Edmund White, describing the San Francisco gay ‘look’ in his travel book States of Desire (1980). Bodies made themselves intelligible: A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of ...”

“... Bervin surmises in her introduction, that Dickinson may well have kept in the pocket of her famous white dress. Dickinson’s ‘one surviving dress has a large external pocket on the right side, where her hand would fall easily at rest’. The ‘economy’, Bervin continues, ‘of the pocket is worth considering. An envelope is a pocket. An envelope refolds ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... interest, the fact is that they seldom, if ever, reach a conclusion about it. As Nye points out, Peter Trubowitz’s exhaustive study of the way Americans defined the national interest throughout the 20th century concluded that ‘there is no single national interest. Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defence should ...”

“... Old Man’s a Dustman’ because it meant I could sing in Cockney . . . I liked ‘Little White Bull’ for the same Cockneyphile reasons . . . I liked Rosemary Clooney’s ‘This Old House’ . . . I loved ‘Dem Bones Dem Bones (Dem Dry Bones)’, for reasons that had nothing to do with the words. One is reminded of the joke about the Oxford ...”

“... edition, with its alternately haunting and embarrassing photomontages and a fine introduction by Peter Porter, is a perfect invitation to rereading. There are many people who are sure the Quartet is a masterpiece of some sort, however patchy; and there are people who are sure it’s not a masterpiece because they find it unreadable. I have, at different ...”

“... and its personnel were far brighter than SIS’s ‘failed cavalry officers recruited in White’s or Boodle’s’. It was also less socially exclusive than the other secret services, giving it a wider pool of potential talent to trawl, though that was also thought to pose dangers: could the other classes’ loyalties be trusted? Despite these ...”

“... It’s hard to know how seriously Chandler took these musings. On top of being a relapse-prone white-knuckle drunk, he was a lonely man who preferred the mail to company and took pains to make his letters entertainingly cantankerous. Still, it’s clear that he had trouble reconciling the clean-limbed notions of ‘romance’ he’d absorbed in his youth ...”

“... he wrote The Corrections and Freedom – two internationally bestselling epics of middle-class white America struggling with marriage, parenthood, illness and climate change – and his two earlier, somewhat disavowed systems novels. Thirty years ago he was just a Swarthmore student abroad in what was still West Berlin, exploring his vices and ...”

“... The Fate of Rome (2017). The barbarians, meanwhile, have made a distinct comeback, since Peter Heather made a spirited case for their share of responsibility in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2005). Douglas Boin proposes another topical solution, blaming neither barbarians nor Romans but the relationship between them. One of the most important ...”

“... supported the same football teams, and wore the same aftershave. Meanwhile, Adam Ant painted a white stripe across his face and sported more lip gloss than Madonna.Transgression isn’t for everyone, but it tempts the future. A lot of the electronic bands of that period dealt in a kind of transgressive yearning, seeming to feel homesick for somewhere that ...”

“... Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”