“... Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on closing the book, ask himself what is the good of it all from a practical point of view, he cannot but admire the extraordinary patience and erudition of Dr Goebel in having gathered together such a mass of interesting historical material.’ But ...”

“... war and those now towards the threat of global heating. Most of us think that something unpleasant may soon happen, but we are as confused as we were in 1938 over what form it will take and what to do about it. Our response so far is just like that before the Second World War, an attempt to appease. The Kyoto agreement was uncannily like that of Munich, with ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge ...”

“... to me, will always be at the head of this letter. Though the chief emphasis is on how Muñiz may be of service to him, Darwin shows respect for Muñiz’s efforts and his admiring astonishment that a man can carry on without colleagues to discuss his work with. He does more. He writes on Muñiz’s behalf to the influential ...”

“... like that around why let ashes go to ashes? If you can keep yourself together long enough there may be a whole new world awaiting you. So when Dora Kent died in 1987 she was given the treatment – head only in her case. Unfortunately the operatives who decided she was dead were not licensed physicians. With the head safely in the ‘cephalarium ...”

“... was not so much a work of tenacious parody or stomping satire as a pretty good leg-pull: which may be why the London Review of Books, when the letters were published in 1979, called them ‘a disgrace to publishing’. I liked the jape. Or at least, I liked maybe two-thirds of it. Because once you realised what Root was up to and how he made the joke work ...”

“... and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only ...”

“... innuendo, gossip and speculation surrounds nuggets of fact. When Feltrinelli went to Bolivia he ‘may just have gone to visit Guevara’s best French friend, Régis Debray, in a Bolivian jail at the time’. (Who is to say? Not Claire Sterling, apparently.) Feltrinelli is the target of a particularly unpleasant kind of sexual mockery. Born with ‘a ...”

“... The bird-cage contains a live bird and the whole is reflected in a mirror opposite. London, 1 May. When Denholm Elliott is sent a script he opens it in the middle and reads a few pages. If he likes it, finds the characters interesting, he goes back to the beginning and reads it through. ‘You soon enough decide whether these are the kind of people you ...”

“... drew on arguments the kings themselves had to make in order to raise taxes and fund their wars. As Richard Tuck has suggested, it may have been Charles himself who opened the door to democracy in England. Levying an ancient tax on coastal towns (ship money) to fund a naval expedition against the Dutch, the Crown made the ...”

“... specific questions for the theory to answer. Responding to this challenge, Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman invented novel ways of tackling the problem. Some of the steps had already been taken earlier by Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in Japan. Dyson was the first to understand the approaches both of Schwinger and of Feynman, and to demonstrate that, while ...”

“... twitching familiarity, are what fascinate him in his fastidious art. And – in case such analysis may make The Silence in the Garden sound too solemnly grim a work – I ought to say that the book is irradiated with not only comic moments but comic sequences, including some juxtapositions of a Church of Ireland bishop with a stotious boarding-house lady which ...”

“... be said about their place in the history of the English Church. They illuminate the attitudes of Richard Bancroft, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, who showed plenty of sympathy for a group of moderately anti-Papist but episcopalian Catholic priests and none at all for Presbyterian, or even non-Presbyterian, promoters of the ‘pretended holy ...”

“... this recovery of ‘circumstance’ has an invigorating effect on the myths Warner examines. It may be that historical time is richer in the contradiction and instability that keep myths vital than the unchanging Dreamtime or Time of Origins (‘illo tempore’) designated as the true locus of myth by Mircea Eliade. Or perhaps it is simply that Warner is ...”

“... also have our own supersized mindfuck when it comes to the accumulating and spaffing of cash. You may not believe it, as the cost of living crisis rages and the planet boils, but London – having just lost its status as Russia’s favourite laundromat – is now the private jet capital of Europe. ‘The obvious reason that private airlines have done so well ...”