“... Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the Brexit vote), responds to the books he’s reading and to what’s in the papers, as well as occasionally registering very beautifully the changing seasons in his garden and, somewhere in the background, the progress of the church year. Parts of the poem are movingly autobiographical, full of elegiac ...”

“... writings.1957 was the year I should have come down from Oxford but didn’t and one thing I think reading this tosh is that if I hadn’t got a First (the circumstances undescribed in the diary) I would never have picked myself up to do much except possibly teach – and teach badly. It was the fairly spurious self-confidence I got from this fluke ...”

“... Netta unconsciously lusts after Hitler and occasionally goes to bed with her Fascist friend Peter, a nastily moustached man who’s served time in prison for fatally running over a pedestrian while drunk. Unknown to her, Bone has a split personality – a darkly humorous plot device that comes across as an exaggeration of a blackout-prone drinker’s ...”

“... routines didn’t need to be solemn: on one occasion she and Roy sifted poetry submissions by reading them aloud in a Barnsley accent. Anything that didn’t produce hysterical laughter went forward for further consideration. When Roy’s father died she volunteered to help with the catering after the funeral, but made herself scarce when family arrived ...”

“... in the Ministry of Education and ever the brilliant talent scout, he secured the appointment of Peter Behrens as director of the Düsseldorf Academy. The same year he was instrumental in establishing the Deutsche Werkbund in Munich. The Werkbund was committed to design reform, as William Morris had been, but to reform that worked with industry not against ...”

“... years (a lazy idea anyway) does not fit his career. He was, and remains, a contrarian. The writer Peter Chotjewitz made the point cruelly a few years ago: Enzensberger was, he said, a political dandy, ‘a conductor who calls everyone aboard and then nips off on a train going in the opposite direction because it’s so wonderfully empty’. Chotjewitz is ...”

“... remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly anything worth reading twice about Burroughs’s writing, as distinct from his wildly chequered life and surprisingly genial personality, has appeared since Mary McCarthy’s New York Review essay on Naked Lunch in 1963. Negative reviews throughout his career consistently ...”

“... Sherlock Holmes’s first outing, but by the time Conan Doyle put pen to paper everyone was reading detective stories. In the intervening years they multiplied out of sensation and mystery novels, gothic melodramas, feuilletons, casebooks and crime reports and became a genre of their own. Few of the early works are read these days; fewer still are in ...”

“... with ever equal and even skill and patience.’ The guides seem designed for two people: one reading from the book, the other taking in what’s being described as they look on. (Lola died in 1963; Pevsner’s later journeys were usually made with students from the Courtauld.) The first edition of the Suffolk guide was published in 1961; it was revised ...”

“... religious and medical treatises, that can be subject to the same philological treatment, a close reading of terms that connect and complicate one another or diverge in signal ways.In his second section, Heller-Roazen considers people diminished in legal standing, whose situation inverts that of the vanished: the living body remains but civil rights are ...”

“... his subject was the way that architecture evolved, and it is tempting to wonder whether, reading him, it may have become easier to conceive of the evolution of the species.Some​ of the more severe scholars described here may have preferred to be regarded as historians or archaeologists rather than as antiquaries, given that the latter were closely ...”

“... if it was a sin to shorten life, it must also be a sin to prolong it. An Anglican divine, Canon Peter Green, pointed out about a hundred years ago that it wasn’t easy for a society that sanctioned capital punishment to maintain that only God could give or take life. And so the hypocrisies went on. In one form or another they still do. And so do the ...”

“... however, the trend was in the opposite direction: the internal passport regime introduced by Peter the Great at the beginning of the 18th century was long retained as a regulator of movement. The Russian internal passport on the eve of the First World War identified its holders (men only) by title or rank, religion, marital status and liability for ...”

“... him to be a ‘mulierast’, and that Bosie was rumoured to have taken to an eyeglass, after reading the case of a Major Parkinson who cut his throat with a bit of glass in a Holloway cell. Max’s was a tough, unsentimental world, but could combine both feeling and elegance with toughness. If Max really was leading a double life – a pleasurable but ...”

“... is dead. The second QC brought in to prosecute Judith Ward, then a rising star at the bar called Peter Taylor QC, is now the Lord Chief Justice. From his office and from that of Mr Walsh there has been not a single expression of explanation or regret about the conviction of Judith Ward as a result of their own failure to disclose the evidence which might ...”