“... the Americans, in 1975 Whitlam was removed from office on flimsy grounds by the governor-general, John Kerr, and intelligence co-operation resumed. Kerbaj refrains from judgment on whether the CIA had a hand in the matter.In New Zealand, there was a more sustained challenge to the country’s position as a far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and ...”

“... available even without the kind of ‘publication’ we are accustomed to.Piers Plowman, the other major poetic work of the later-14th-century alliterative tradition, survives in more than fifty copies and fragments (it is very long, and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to ...”

“... irony . . . and from the practically Dickensian humour governing the characterisation in the major novels.’ In the same volume there is a fierce essay by Timothy Buck on the insufficiencies of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by ...”

“... woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of condition and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well, when he suckt another of contrary ...”

“... is almost certainly the right one: a large proportion of the electorate concluded that the major parties had nothing to offer them and stayed away. That might be hard on the Liberal Democrats, but it’s true enough of the other two parties. It is the adoption by the Labour Party of a neo-Thatcherite programme, modified too late for many (and thus the ...”

“... one of the most love-filled conventions in the history of conventions’. Amazingly, most of the major figures in the Republican Party stayed away: all of the previous presidential and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of ...”

“... Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the ...”

“... Twenty-one years ago, in The Characters of Love, John Bayley suggested that ‘there is a sense in which the highest compliment we can pay to Shakespeare is to discuss his great plays as if they were also great novels.’ At that time, Othello seemed to him particularly (indeed uniquely) responsive to such treatment ...”

“... while back home the film-rights money was rolling in – when he got an order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive ...”

“... show buildings that are still quite recognisable today; pictures of the ‘Cromwell curve’, with John Fowler’s concrete bridge of 1867-9, are evidence of the scale of engineering work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how ...”

“... it still seems to be true. Because so much of this book is about the great and the good, the two major innovations in editorial policy are less exciting than might appear at first glance. The promise to be more candid about sex and scandal, spying and secrecy, represents a significant shift from the stern and unbending days of Stephen and Lee: but in ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... convictions of the ‘no history’ sort – to the point that this achievement may be seen as a major advance in late 20th-century humanism. Even with little written evidence earlier than about 1000 AD, the process of Iron Age innovation and development is now reasonably clear in its outlines for most regions of the continent, and increasingly in cumulative ...”

“... In the late​ 1990s a white teenager called John Walker Lindh converted to Islam and began worshipping at the Islamic Centre of Mill Valley in Marin County, California. Brought up as a Catholic, he studied many world religions but was attracted to Islam after seeing Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. He soon found himself out of place in his American suburb – according to a family friend, he wore ‘the long robes and pillbox hat’ and grew a beard – so instead of university he went to Yemen to learn Arabic and then to a madrasa in Pakistan, where he intended to memorise the Quran ...”

“... John Evelyn was a dry old stick – and here that metaphor has an almost literal force, since his first and greatest love was for trees. In Fumifugium (1661) he argued that smoky workshops should be banished from London, and that the environs of the city should be planted with ‘such Shrubs, as yield the most fragrant and odoriferous Flowers’ to sweeten its stench ...”