“... just for us), and then by the way the literary journalism overreaches itself when it touches home base. It’s a pity that James, who can talk with such trenchancy and sense about everything from Mandelstam to Martin Amis, makes such a fool of himself (and of us) when he touches on the literature of his birthplace. His recent overview of Australian ...”

“... of witnesses and the rigging of a High Court jury, exposed the complete dependence of the Labour Home Secretary Merlyn Rees on the ‘advice’ of comical yet sinister reactionaries in the security underworld – forces that had demonstrated many times that they did not care about election results and did not care for election results that returned non-Tory ...”

“... from Austria. The other woman was a Londoner, Muriel Eady, who had grown up in a children’s home after her mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918. A femur belonging to one of the women, dug up by the Christies’ dog, Judy, was being used to prop up a fence.The story of the six bodies was of instant sensational interest to the prim but prurient 1950s ...”

“... when the Muggletonian Reading Room in Bishopsgate was blitzed. These boxes have now found a home in the British Library as Additional MSS 60168-60256, thanks to the good offices of Noakes’s widow, Thompson, William Lamont and others. What to do with this equivalent, for the archaeology of sectarian nonconformity, of Howard Carter’s discovery of the ...”

“... in September 2013 showed no improvement, the parliamentary under-secretary of state for schools, Lord Nash, wrote to tell the school its funding arrangement would cease and that it must close. The Discovery New School was the first closure, but not the most notorious. The Al-Madinah School in Derby was forced to close its secondary school when ...”

“... alive. ‘When I was dead, my spirit turned/To seek the much-frequented house,’ begins ‘At Home’, whose speaker discovers that her former friends are still enjoying themselves and expecting tomorrow to be better, because they have a tomorrow to look forward to:I shivered comfortless, but cast                    No chill across 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 ...”

“... and are proud to be just about decipherable in the blurred background of a majesty-mayoral-chain-lord-lieutenant-town-crier framed photo on a mantlepiece of honour in a spit and polish house just like all the houses of the house-proud little people they’ve ever seen. They know the scent of fresh paint, of just-crimped lawns, beeswax, Cardinal Red ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of it was spent as an MP. Parliamentary and ministerial precocity went together. Jenkins was Home Secretary at 45, the youngest since Winston Churchill, and Chancellor of the Exchequer at 47. In both these posts he gave much-needed sparkle to a drab and sometimes grubby government; in the second, he also managed to undo much, though not all, of the ...”

“... For whom the stars move and their breath is fire – it hardly tries to give us Dionysus, the lord of dancing. Altogether the choruses are less richly rendered than they are in the translation by Robert Fagles, but the austerity is deliberate and this whole work is very cool and restrained. It results from an independent approach to Sophocles, and the ...”

“... The question what Keynes would be advocating today is, of course, a nonsense question.’ So Lord Kahn warned us in a brilliant lecture in 1974, invoking Keynes’s propensity – ‘apart from the fact that he would be 91 years old’ – to develop new answers for new questions, rather than to make a fetish of consistency ...”

“... morning again. As always, they find no inspiration in Clement Attlee. He is very much Labour’s Lord Salisbury – long-lasting and successful, but an end rather than a beginning. Instead it is Nye Bevan whose words our authors like to quote. As a whole, Renewal scarcely does justice to the range of ideas recently emerging from the Opposition. The omissions ...”

“... him of exploitation of her, use of her ideas (as if those ideas were actually owned by her – the Lord is a jealous Lord), and even of theft of notebooks left behind in 1936 in their joint Mallorcan home. The notebooks were in fact destroyed unread by Graves within a few weeks of his ...”

“... walking tour, leaving his clothes on the banks of the Danube to suggest that he’d drowned. (Lord Cockburn, a family friend, feared the influence of Young Werther and ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’.) He reappeared in Edinburgh two years later, still not cured despite the excruciating interventions of a Hungarian surgeon; eventually a French ...”