“... this is that Gascoigne did not produce the blinding line or the sumptuous phrase for T.S. Eliot to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He certainly ...”

“... Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy used BBC classical records from a Shaftesbury Avenue shop. They circulated among themselves copies of the New ...”

“... Here and there McWilliam does catch a glimpse of the Claimant as a more timeless figure: a modern lord of misrule, the ultimate inappropriate person. His childlike greed, his knee-jerk lusts, his refusal to be cast down, make him irresistible in a ghastly sort of way, and it is hard not to sympathise with him through all the ordeals he brought on himself. The ...”

“... Swinburne, who proposed that Romeo was a satirical representation of the queen’s aged counsellor Lord Burghley, ‘the first and perhaps the strongest evidence’ being the ‘impossibility of discovering a single point of likeness’, for ‘this would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful ...”

“... only an adherent, and although my theology and politics have changed, I consider it a cultural home – but one to which I cannot return. That is both a sadness and a relief. But it’s the reason the present debate in the SNP seems to me like a fever dream or a bad bout of Covid. I cannot believe this is happening; where am I, and why does my face feel so ...”

“... palatinates, territories to which the king’s writ did not run. Instead, Castor explains, the lord of such a region ‘had the right to exercise judicial authority within its borders in the king’s name and on his behalf’. Richard was earl of Chester, and when he was at odds with Parliament he could more easily recruit men and resources from the ...”

“... ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the expeditions more than made up for it. Bennet Burleigh, their doyen, had a ...”

“... of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ever commanded popular assent. When Erasmus called him ‘a man for all ...”

“... heard about ‘people who sold surplus factory items on a television programme called Shopping at Home. Models walked back and forth in front of the camera wearing clothes or jewellery that hadn’t sold in stores, while the announcer worked up his audience by saying that the item’s retail value was a hundred dollars, but anyone who called in the next ten ...”

“... it has the qualities Auden praised in Jane Austen’s work, when he wrote (in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’) that You could not shock her more than she shocks me; Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass. It makes me most uncomfortable to see An English spinster of the middle class Describe the amorous effect of ‘brass’, Reveal so frankly and with ...”

“... London hospital consultants and those elsewhere, and most of all between the prima donna figure of Lord Moran and everybody else. But the hospitals could not survive as they had been. There was no likelihood that the voluntary ones could go it alone because the level of taxation was high enough to preclude the charity they would need. Collecting silver paper ...”

“... joins the celebrations of harmony at the back of a polished Mercedes and at the bar of the luxury Lord Charles Hotel. The papers dwell in infinite detail on the refined menu, not failing to notice the visitors’ preference for the carvery. How much it costs the taxpayer to accommodate the ‘poor ANC’ in style provides another headline. In the ...”

“... penal laws, who created our modern budgetary system. Above all, it was Peel who, in the words of Lord Blake, created a ‘libertarian fiscal policy which would in the end bring increased affluence to every class in society and thus relax the tensions which in the hungry 1830s and 40s threatened revolution in Britain’. Disraeli was the dreamer and the ...”

“... letters some glimmers of his old genius for descriptive prose, a genius liberally represented in Lord Clark’s Ruskin Today, first published in 1964, which Penguin has restored to print. Generally, however, the famous lapidary style of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice doesn’t often appear in Ruskin’s side of the correspondence. The Carlyle of ...”

“... the patient intelligence that compensates for growing old. As Hercule Poirot had waxed moustaches, Lord Peter Wimsey collected first editions and Nero Wolfe wore yellow pyjamas, so Wexford is the sort of man who is always badly dressed and is never certain of having a clean handkerchief. Like Appleby, he has a tendency to quote from literature, but the ...”