“... When John Curtis left Penguin for Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1957 (leaving the vacancy that the young Tom Maschler would fill), he was told two things. At Weidenfeld and Nicolson, authority was not devolved via committee: this was George Weidenfeld’s show. Second, Curtis was told, the aim of the house was to ‘open a window to Europe and the world’. So ...”

“... There are​ few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses. Or take Ingres’s earlier but equally celebrated portrayal of the Baronne de Rothschild, a woman Heinrich Heine compared to an angel ...”

“... in Husbandry in Early Modern England sets out their life pattern and prospects. Service was, for young folk, they hoped, only a period in their lives before they would be promoted to tenancy. In the agriculture of the day many tasks were held as suitable for specific age groups. After working at a boy’s task an adolescent would graduate to harder manual ...”

“... admirer, Francis Wyndham, stayed non-committal about the subject-matter: ‘The narrator is a young girl in love with a married man. That is the “story”.’ Wyndham proved not to be cautious enough. From the Journals now published it would seem that not one but two or even perhaps three love affairs are referred to in various passages, although the ...”

“... calls them up are they recognised as such. Paradise has to be lost before it can be gained. The young Buddhists couldn’t enjoy themselves catching fish, but they used to watch the Christian children fishing from the river-bank. Nor could they properly catch bait for their friends, though they might, speechlessly and as it were absent-mindedly, point out ...”

“... like Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who from safe offices and Ops Rooms sent so many young men to futile and agonising deaths. The Dam Busters was made in 1954, when the myth of Bomber Command’s strategic success was still relatively unscathed by revisionist historians.* Harris is portrayed in it without criticism – indeed, as a kind of wise ...”

“... than battering helplessly on the established centres of power: the Anti-Nazi League drew young enthusiasts from a wide political spectrum. The National Front, in its turn, needed the Anti-Nazi League (or some equivalent). The prospect of a legitimised punch-up was one of the recruiting draws of the NF. The confrontations with the Anti-Nazi League ...”

“... it. But no revival followed. ‘The Yiddish-speaking public voted with its feet,’ the journalist Michael Ohad wrote. ‘Our calculations were wrong. Di Megile wasn’t the swallow that heralded Yiddish’s revival. Di Megile was the wreath we laid on its grave.’ The 1967 war was a turning point for Yiddish, or at least Eastern European Ashkenazi ...”

“... is probably unique in his lack of conventional qualifications for the job. George Lansbury and Michael Foot, the former Labour leaders he most resembles, had been cabinet ministers; Foot was Callaghan’s deputy in the 1976-79 government. Corbyn’s lack of conventional qualifications, however, is the reason he won. He was in a sense an anti-candidate: he ...”

“... the work at a loss or not at all. At the start of his brief tenure as lord chancellor in 2015 Michael Gove got the diagnosis right when he said that the UK has a two-tier justice system in criminal law, favouring the rich at the expense of everyone else: The waste and inefficiency inherent in such a system are obvious. But perhaps even more unforgivable ...”

“... be a greater weight of plastic in the seas than fish. The secretary of state for the environment, Michael Gove, watching Blue Planet 2 and moved by images of, among other things, a turtle caught in plastic, tweeted that ‘the imperative to do more to tackle plastic in our oceans is clear.’ What should be done? New laws could be passed. But that will help ...”

“... in the selection at the BL, prefer quieter, more personal episodes to large-scale violence: the young Alexander’s taming of the horse Bucephalas; his education under Aristotle; his devotion to his close friend (and possible lover) Hephaestion; his marriage to Roxane, an Iranian chieftain’s daughter. Such moments soften the hard edges of the historical ...”

“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one ...”

“... old man mumbled something unconvincing about property prices. Why did the quintessentially English Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty miles out of Austin, as a suitable estate for his tax exile? Only the cats know. Spooky, over-refined Egyptian beasts who are let out on a leash while the dew is on ...”

“... in her poetry: it is her craftsmanship that is paid the sincerest compliment in the words of the young poet today. The drama she made of herself goes into the museum of legend, the vivid fictions live on. Alvarez himself rightly forecast the ‘new areas of experience’ which would result from poetry exploring its own sorts of fiction in its own ways. But ...”