“... a poor husband for an immensely attractive and highly intelligent girl, who was anyway still too young to marry. He was reserved, dull and apparently interested only in dogs – when she fainted at a ball during their engagement, he showed no concern, carrying on talking to his friends – though he did have an illegitimate daughter before he ...”

“... a very difficult because compacted poem, evidently arose from a terrible accident to a young man. And an extraordinary poem, ‘Wanting to live in Harlem’, from Final Solutions, makes irrefutable connections between a boy growing up in St Louis, dreams of a fair black woman, two boys in Harlem, and an account – taken from the Cambridge Ancient ...”

“... toward its present form. McDowell is a Senior Fellow of Trinity and a well-known historian. David Webb is a Fellow Emeritus of the College and Honorary Professor of Systematic Botany. ‘Virtue and religion’ meant, of course, Anglicanism. The Fellows of Trinity were required to take an oath and, in most cases, to take Anglican orders. Undergraduates ...”

“... point, Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he ...”

“... David Vann’s novel – his debut, after a short story collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a long trudge through a post-apocalyptic landscape, a woman turns up on the last page, out of the blue, and says: ‘The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time ...”

“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... still had to argue endlessly with customs officials and ended up paying much of the time. The young Swiss physician Thomas Platter had better luck at the end of the 16th century. His passport issued in Geneva was accepted on the Rhone boat from Lyon, but passengers without papers simply bribed the boatmen and on they went. To enter Catholic Spain, Platter ...”

“... as linguistic. These multiple associations are all incisively reconstructed and investigated in David Fishman’s The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture. This is a brief but compact book, divided into two parts that concentrate on two roughly contiguous historical periods: tsarist Russia from the end of the 19th century to 1914, and Poland between the wars. It ...”

“... would die of throat cancer. He also claimed the Liberal Government had killed King Edward VII. David Gilmour, who does the best he can to defend Kipling against his detractors, insists that some of this was not intended ‘personally’, but it is hard to see how that could be. In fact Kipling comes over as a deeply unsympathetic character in this superb ...”

“... took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was Cabourg, Proust’s Balbec. Channon dined with Princesse ...”

“... house. Within hours of her murder Tony Blair spoke of it as ‘a disgusting act of barbarity’. David Andrews, the Irish Foreign Minister, said that it was ‘clearly designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few ...”

“... to the rubbish bin – and so it was a great deal easier, after the failure of the Camp David summit last July, to claim, as Clinton and Barak have done, that the Palestinians were to blame for the impasse, rather than the Israelis, whose position remains that the 1967 territories are not to be returned. The US press has referred again and again to ...”

“... lay with those of their contemporaries who tried to continue some form of modern classicism – David Wild, John Winter, David Chipperfield, Tony Fretton, Georgie Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found ...”

“... clips with rapid scene cuts and thumping soundtracks, usually portraying the ‘journeys’ of young people like Ahmed, as well as providing practical advice on how to handle everything from buy-to-let mortgages to capital gains tax. Ahmed says that his audience ranges from university students to millennials in their late thirties or early ...”

“... we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around. The service in the village church ...”