“... me, for no good reason, of those in The Turn of the Screw.) In such a flat account, though, it may seem rather unctuously moral. This is avoided, in part, through the elegant deliberation of Jacobson’s style, with the occasional use of words like ‘indocile’ and ‘delation’ to give savour to the story’s simplicity, but also because the tale is ...”

“... the Faith, and the more ambitious one the following year which he called Triumph of the Will. She may not be the star of these (he is), but she is everything else. On the day of Triumph’s grand premiere before the Nazi big-wigs they are still dubbing the music, and guess what? ‘Despite hours of practice, neither the conductor nor Herr Windt’ – Herbert ...”

“... that of the Tories who immediately preceded him in office. If this is true, which is doubtful, it may be simply that he has had more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to ...”

“... far from dead. Attributing Wilkes’s success to a mixture of the spontaneous and the artificial may go some way to explaining why it was that many contemporaries, while suffering all the real inconveniences of his cheeky initiatives, could not in the end take the man seriously. Burke wrote to him and negotiated with him, but concluded only that he was ...”

“... In the Irish section, for instance, his cheerful, affectionate sparring with Pete the Postman may seem more real, more fully imagined within the terms of naturalistic fiction, but there’s also the sense that it is merely a gloss on the surface of deeper currents of feeling. This is brought home by an affecting moment when Pete is driving the miserable ...”

“... accompanied by auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution’. In his entry for ‘May 1969’, Gascoyne snatches at themes that might become fully-developed poems; that might – through some form of transference – become part of Vale Royal. 1. A voice from childhood. Buttercups. Butterflies. Gold: the Psyche. Royalty incognito and ...”

“... acted odiously. No doubt the joke that d’Eon was madly in love with him was one that d’Eon may have played up to at first, but Beaumarchais was malicious enough to report it to the Government as literal fact. When d’Eon discovered, to his fury, that Beaumarchais’s real interest in the question of his gender was to win a fortune by insider ...”

“... men such as he, ready to dare the untried and to venture boldly into new paths. Individuals may suffer from the cost of the experiments, but the nation, which is an aggregate of individuals, gains, and so does the world at large.’ Brunel’s fame eclipsed that of his father. His close friend Daniel Gooch, whose memoirs and diary only became generally ...”

“... of his willingness to break a corrupt labour ring. But if Mr Hammond is candid with himself, he may still concede that while the union lost nothing in practical terms, yet modern, solvent, professionally-run, member-responsive unionism requires as much to be sold as fought for, and that he will be remembered rather for combat than ...”

“... material (like his hero, the author was raised both in Guatemala City and suburban Boston). So we may be in for a long ...”

“... Snug for Updike and his male heroes, we need to add. Alf’s writing, as the inventory above may begin to suggest, is full of delight in the evoked absurdity of things: not their transience, but their likeable (and sometimes not so likeable) battiness. Here is Alf on the Student Centre at the College where he works: ‘On the second floor, reachable by ...”

“... works, like the Anglo-Irish Agreement, have a dual identity at various crucial moments. Southey may appear to be a deservedly neglected figure who is not worth any extensive critical attention, but his sojourn in Ireland reveals some of the tensions that underlie that dual identity. Although Paulin’s exegetical gifts are prodigious, they cannot be ...”

“... McDonald’s, procuring the actors and scripting the event. Looking for big and easy payoffs, he may recruit pregnant women as passengers in the cow car, or target cars driven by men who have just picked up prostitutes, to embarrass them into admitting fault immediately. The Ramblin’ Man, a former cop who staged more than 150 crashes in ...”

“... so improbable indeed that one wonders why they bother to make it. Although landing aircraft may be fractionally quieter than in the past, the difference is not apparent to the naked ear; so we have aircraft making the same noise as before, except that there are now a great many more of them. BAA’s claim that Terminal Five would produce relatively few ...”

“... handle by EMI) and repackage them as something as cosily British as Benny Hill. At some point, we may be sure, the Monarch will be called on to honour the entrepreneur who gave us (to his own considerable enrichment) Johnny Rotten’s ‘God Save the Queen’ (‘She ain’t no human being’). Branson’s sanitising touch has been used to more worthy effect ...”