“... your thought’. She is delighted to accept. This is joltingly hard to read today – even P.D. James, no slave to political correctness, calls it ‘blatant misogyny’. It goes a long way to ruining what is otherwise a prime example of golden age detective fiction. Sayers gets into similar difficulties with the character of Harriet Vane, who is unmarried ...”

“... his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and empress of India’), Churchill (1874-1965, ‘prime ...”

“... in this brief and (as it may seem) tub-thumping piece of perhaps 1844. Whether Admiral Lord Nelson deserved such accolades is a question that belongs in another universe of discourse; what matters for poetics is the momentous proof that off-rhyme can supply a more satisfying closure than full rhyme could. This was one Victorian who could speak to ...”

“... Hardly any good poems came out of the conflict in Vietnam and most of those were written by James Fenton, a poet alert to the eerie surrealism of war. What happens when the war is banished from the front page and into the history books? Pound said, in the ABC of Reading, that ‘literature is news that STAYS news.’ Eliot, on the other hand, was less ...”

“... squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch the persons of the nobility, so ...”

“... with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and with a measure of impartiality, reporting Lord Annan’s opinion that Leavis’s treatment was, in MacKillop’s paraphrase, ‘tough, but not unexpected or unjust’. Annan was Provost of King’s and knew the Cambridge system, if that is the word, intimately. But MacKillop also knows it, and, with his ...”

“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... of child labour in London, the return to his mother in Brighton. His autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord!, fills them out in greater detail, but also offers a caveat: no ‘fiction-monger’ writing a memoir can be trusted, he says, since he will ‘helplessly, perhaps even thoughtlessly, but more probably designedly, select, omit, minimise, exaggerate, in fact ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian denomination, and so ...”

“... This place rumourd to have been a City surely was, separated from us by the hand of the Lord. The devout have laid out gardens in the desert, drawn water from springs where the light was blighted. How tenderly they must attend these friendships or all is lost. All is lost. Only the faithful hold this place green. Sometimes his taste for the eternal ...”

“... coffin, with Kenyatta letting them stay and hold on to their farms if they wanted – came when Lord Lambton, about as kosher an aristocrat as you could find in Britain, turned against them over Hola. The puzzle is why they were allowed to get away with it for so long. It was not as if there were no protests in Britain. The British people have never been ...”

“... returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. It may seem ‘far-fetched’, Sharpe acknowledges, to connect the ...”

“... growth of tension between court and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary ...”

“... Cocteau, Eugene Berman, Poulenc, Henze, Boulez, Copland, Carlos Chávez, Charles-Albert Cingria, Lord Berners, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Edward James, Kopeikine (Balanchine’s pianist) e tutti quanti – surely reflects his relationship with his brother.’ But the claim that Walsh avoided ‘accurately informed people ...”