“... a sufferer, as if even in the Eighties, kingship’s healing magic might still somehow work. It may be too much too late, but no one can blame the Government for not trying. It’s only in one’s more paranoid moments that one seems to glimpse a ghastly connivance between the socio-sexual effects of Aids and the avowed Thatcherite intent to reinstate good ...”

“... on the one hand, and a bogus progressiveness, on the other. Having repudiated both of these, they may acquire a certain soundness of outlook. There is, however, something a little arid about the schoolmaster’s prescription for fulfilment. In Brown’s sea valley, small events take on an epic significance, like the feud between ‘the crofts of Gorse and ...”

“... own account of that era, we can share ‘the view from No 11’ with him. Lawson admits that he may have been ‘slow to recognise the inflationary threat in the late Eighties’, when he was still stoking up the boom in an intoxicating binge from which we are even now suffering the hangover. ‘I have no doubt that I have made my share of ...”

“... to be covertly feminist. All those women with swan necks bared are waiting for deliverance. We may think the bat swooping in through the casement window is headed straight for the jugular, but what is really going on, Auerbach says, is ‘women opening windows beyond the family and, in the guise of vampire victims, surging into themselves’. The ...”

“... over the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, making the point that whatever the final verdict may be on the question of forgery, it is well to remember that no great Scottish writer has failed to display questionable, if not criminal, characteristics in regard to his personal character or in connection with his work, and that, even if the charges against ...”

“... but they never succeeded, except in their own estimation. Now, however, we are faced with what may be an even more forlorn effort, to fold Thomas Carlyle to their collective bosom. It so happens that Carlyle had a famous quarrel with Mill, in which most observers would have favoured Mill. Something deep in Mill’s outlook offended Toryism, old or ...”

“... bond with it. The US enjoins its newcomers to forget the past and embrace the American way; Canada may offer opportunity or refuge, but no obligatory national dream. Davies himself has been a kind of twice-born Canadian, familiar with the different states of being settled in one’s country, leaving it, and then choosing to return. He was born into the Ontario ...”

“... and was awarded the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1952. The success of The Sea around Us may have had something to do with the growing anxieties of a public entering the Cold War and the Korean crisis. As Lear points out, the ocean was seen as America’s best line of defence and it is interesting that the best-seller lists of the time were dominated ...”

“... a firetrap in which everyone casually smokes. Julia’s TV career is in danger – her character may be killed off, a crime within a fiction within a crime fiction. Someone nearly drowns, and then someone else nearly drowns. Brodie sees a young hitchhiker with a unicorn backpack, and later finds a similar backpack washed up on the beach. ‘Jackson didn’t ...”

“... it hardly tries to be a catalogue – that accompanies the V&A’s Bags: Inside Out (reopening 17 May), bags get a desiccated write-up: a feeble foreword by Tristram Hunt, woolly captions, bland generalisations, brand worship. This doesn’t begin to do justice to the sometimes barmy bravura of what is on show. Emily Jo Gibbs’s horse chestnut bag ...”

“... father wasn’t one to make things like this up, so the commas must be there somewhere, and it may well be that he added some other punctuation: the odd full stop, perhaps even a semi-colon or colon. Indeed, in his marginal notes to the first edition of Heaney’s debut collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966), which Heaney inscribed to my parents with a ...”

“... gave offence: ‘The right management of so nice and ticklish a business, wherein a little slip may spoil all, is not everyone’s talent.’ Just as bad were ‘frothy light discourses’ and ‘misbecoming wit’ about religious matters. In the 1670s and 1680s Locke supervised the education of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who later became the 3rd earl of ...”

“... come to be seen as a period of national healing is an open question. The exit from Afghanistan may have been humiliating, but something of the sort was inevitable in a war that had long become futile. Although Biden’s Build Back Better social and infrastructure bill has been trimmed from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion, it represents a larger expansion of ...”

“... or developed and remain little more than names). Only the narrator recurs and even he/she may be a different person each time, linked by a common belief in what makes life worth living: art, beauty, nature, friendship, freedom, fresh air and exercise. At the outset, the mood is ominous rather than terrifying. Books keep going missing from ...”

“... techniques and delivered as a template to Surrealists-to-be in his revelatory show in Paris in May 1921. In Belgium, Magritte soon developed a related model of the image – Ernst called it ‘painted collage’ – that was also disruptive in composition but more uniform in facture, and it was even more influential. Meanwhile Yves Tanguy, along with ...”