“... the ore shipments was now a secondary issue: there was more concern to restore Allied prestige at home and abroad after the failure to do anything to save Finland. Contrary to expectations, the German response was swift and ruthless. The Allies found themselves responding to a German initiative in circumstances for which they were deplorably unprepared. Dr ...”

“... be better made to some such document of enveloping contingency as Hofmannsthal’s ‘Letter of Lord Chandos’. The narrative is prone to sudden plunges: disaster strikes repeatedly at the end of Part One, sweeping off half the characters, but at least Banville is good at describing death. The sickness and passing of the narrator’s grandfather, Jack ...”

“... to him as his desire for women was self-affirming and ecstatic,’ Susan Cheever wrote in Home before Dark, published three years after Cheever’s death in 1982. It was the first public admission that ‘the Ovid of Ossining’, the man who once said his epitaph should read ‘Here lies John Cheever/He never disappointed a hostess/Or took it up the ...”

“... to possessing the Bard, is never so whimsical. Another time, Warton is staying at the Hampshire home of a friend and, browsing in his ‘study of old fashioned Books’, comes upon ‘A Description of the Queens (Elisabeth) Entertainment in Progresse, at Lord Hartford’s at Elvetham in Hantsshire’, published in ...”

“... the secret financial relationships of MPs. Summoning his allies, including Lady Thatcher and Lord Archer in the House of Lords, Hamilton inspired an amendment to the Defamation Act then going through Parliament. The amendment, which was drummed through both Houses by the Tory majority, who behaved exactly as if they were being whipped, gave MPs the right ...”

“... for a young man of little tangible achievement, he is surprisingly well received. He returns home in 1639 as the first Bishops’ War is underway, begins publishing his antiprelatical tracts opposing Laud and, rather suddenly, gets married.McDowell sees Milton’s development as illustrative of greater changes in the late 1630s. Church reforms under Laud ...”

“... soon enough and Jones returned to writing, publishing two sub-Walter Scott epic poems, Corayda and Lord Lindsay, and most ambitiously, My Life, a verse novel cum autobiography which Taylor sees as having affinities with Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. The main character is Jones’s idealised version of himself as the aristocrat beset by misfortunes who ...”

“... who had deserted her. Spending so much time in school sanatoriums and lacking strong guidance from home seems to have encouraged a streak of loneliness that came out later in extravagant sociability on the one hand and a fierce intellectual independence on the other. Several of his friends noted that underneath the vivid social personality, Lambert – like ...”

“... depict contests for world domination as Manichean battles against monstrous opponents (as in The Lord of the Rings), the heroic model in antiquity demanded a contest between two noble adversaries. Even when the ‘other’ is a monster, like the centaurs seen in Greek temple friezes grappling with Heracles and the Lapiths, it is idealised and humanised, its ...”

“... to find things out. I went online and read about Balaklava. It wasn’t long before I put ‘Lord Raglan’ into a search engine and soon I was listening to an 1890 recording of Tennyson intoning ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. I was able to read the words as he spoke them and hear the crackles on Thomas Edison’s original wax cylinder ...”

“... knowledge of history. In his youth her husband had turned down Peel’s offer of the post of Irish Lord of the Treasury, and Peel thereafter ignored him, but is said to have prevented him from fighting what would have been the last duel in England. Gregory was later a Trustee of the National Gallery and Governor of Ceylon. She read the books in his excellent ...”

“... extreme symptom of the deracination afflicting almost everyone around Eagle Lake. Despite its down-home preponderance of bait stores, preachers, bass fishing and quiet country roads, the novel frequently tips over into the frazzled territory of white noise and simulacra, ‘postwar, Postmodern, posthuman’, where hospital patients watch hospital shows on TV ...”

“... is often deeply amused by Chapman’s later ability to interact on equal terms with mandarins like Lord Rothschild: having a bounder for a subject means there is a Flashman-like fascination in seeing just how far he can go. But this shouldn’t blind one to his astonishing abilities. Once inducted into the espionage world he soon became a dab hand at the black ...”

“... Alas, dignified mutism as a nation is compatible with and may even cause constant pandemonium at home. On that sounding-board of the national soul, the Edinburgh Scotsman’s letters page, I doubt if a week has passed since Scott’s time without its quota of resentful jibes about non-equality and Southern arrogance. Back in 1925 we find MacDiarmid scorning ...”

“... The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough disaster. Of that case Lord Judge, then lord chief justice, held that ‘it seems to us elementary that the emergence of fresh evidence which may reasonably lead to the conclusion that the substantial truth about how an individual met his death was ...”