“... extremely handy, works at her Needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well. Enquire of Mrs Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, the Strand.’ Huge, ornate images of negroes were displayed outside shops, taverns and coffeehouses, many of which bore names such as the Blackamoor’s Head. Thanks to its blacks London had an air of vibrant ...”

“... to train for a supernaturally revealed task. The hero of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, for instance, must master a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not taken, isn’t the novel at all but ...”

“... Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 became firmly Royalist’, for it is entirely informed by the religious and political ideals of ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... habits of a monk and a rosary each. The list of stars in the film (Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, all the others mentioned elsewhere in this piece) is a clue to what we are watching. They are all themselves, bringing with them the clouds of movies they have been in. They have come to the party. This effect is largely kept up by the ...”

“... leader. Would he – could he? – perform the countless vital tasks that come naturally to David Cameron or Tony Blair: everything from how to comport yourself at the despatch box to the best way to climb out of a chauffeur-driven car, from how to use an autocue to knowing which pop band to choose on Desert Island Discs. If you don’t know which tie ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... and Charles Grandet in some ways prefigures, and is not exceeded by, that between Fleda Vetch and Owen Gereth). The drawback to this approach, oddly, is that if anything it underestimates the novel’s object dimension. Its focus is exclusively on one set of objects: the spoils which, beginning at Poynton, are transferred to Ricks, Mrs Gereth’s new ...”

“... not nearly as good a critic as he evidently thinks he is. Compare his essay on Edward Thomas with David Bromwich’s in a recent Raritan, and you’ll see the academic critic is far better. In scholarship, on the rare occasions on which it arises, Grigson is irresponsible. In The Private Art he says that ‘years ago someone spotted that in another of ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... though, there was nothing that seems likely to stay with us very long. ‘Baby-gol’, Owen’s brilliant strike against Argentina, will certainly be treasured, for patriotic reasons, but surely not his dive in the same match, although the dive was just as useful to the nation’s cause. Owen’s dive, in ...”

“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still ...”

“... who feared that they might be used to prove the antiquity of the world. The naturalist Richard Owen, who worked in London at the centre of an imperial network, identified them as the remains of mammal-like reptiles that he called dicynodonts (from the two canine teeth that these animals used to break up their diet of plants). Pinpointing the position of ...”

“... and was understandably having a hard time of it, he was given a new contract. He was asked by David Dein, the club’s vice-chairman, whether he was all right: ‘I think he expected me to be buzzing and grateful to him for my new deal but I just said, “Actually, David, I’m not,” and proceeded to tell him what was ...”

“... Briggs’s writing lacks the combative forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the olympian grandeur of Owen Chadwick, the stylish verve of J.H. Plumb, the cosmopolitan allusiveness of E.J. Hobsbawm, and the impassioned radicalism of Christopher Hill. Some have criticised his work for being too bland, for lacking analytical bite, for being more concerned with ...”