“... melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James Mason (the villainous Lord Manderstoke) and Stewart Granger (heroic Harry). The Balliol-educated son of an Oxford don, Sadleir was a publisher with Constable and eventually ran the firm. He was also the greatest Victorian bibliophile of his generation and his collection is now held in a library named after ...”

“... lack a natural-bred authority, they need to be more innovative. Some Irish critics, anxious for a home-grown alternative to F.R. Leavis’s Great Tradition, have found it in what is known as Protestant Gothic. There is a fertile lineage of Gothic fiction in Ireland, from Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas to Bram ...”

“... had been revealed, as well as the concurrence of Earth and the Planet of the Apes. There was no home to return to. That Orwell’s Oceania had overtaken us, by means of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (which has its roots in Cyril Kornbluth’s story ‘The Marching Morons’, published in 1951 in Galaxy magazine), seemed more or less a given. So did the ...”

“... regarding the nature of James’s teenage relationship with his older French cousin Esmé Stewart, duke of Lennox, she concludes: ‘My guess is that James was physically attracted to Lennox, but that their relationship was sexually unconsummated.’Elsewhere, she summarises divergent readings of the king’s epic poem, The Lepanto, first published in ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”

“... in Northern Ireland, these Nationalists cannot see why Unionists should not come to feel at home in a united Ireland where, in due course, a consensus would also somehow emerge. The basic problem is that consensus thinking is incompatible with zero-sum thinking, with the assumption that one side’s gain must be another’s loss, with the ‘not an ...”

“... difference. Thus he describes how the Scottish head of the Central School in Hong Kong, Frederick Stewart, endeavoured to create a system combining Scottish and Chinese forms of education, foiling in the process the ‘English Governor, Sir John Pope Hennessy, who wanted to impose a Western curriculum’. But Pope Hennessy was an Irish Catholic, who got into ...”

“... Eliza Lynch’s Irishness, and her childhood in the ‘bitter town’ of Mallow, do call her home. Both take on the fiction writer’s tussle with history and biography, shaping these real lives to their own ends. Here the resemblances end. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch is half the length of the epic Clara, and a rich, flamboyant, mannered book, written ...”

“... were born just before the coup or during the regime, including Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home, Lina Meruane’s Seeing Red and Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder. Zambra has described this movement as ‘the literature of the children’, meaning both the children of the Pinochet era and the children of adults who understood, as their children ...”

“... Party’s foreign policy experts: Ken Clarke, David Gauke, Oliver Letwin, David Lidington and Rory Stewart. With them went the liberal Tory realist tradition of foreign policy which had been a constant of British statecraft since it became a world power. Instead we are in the hands of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister for Brexit opportunities, who told us last ...”

“... we are told, and soon we are settling down with our narrator in the front parlour of the family home in ‘rain-lashed industrial South Wales’, watching old comedy movies on a Coronation-era TV with a wonky contrast-control. Next we learn how he transferred his affection from Wisdom to Sellers and became so enamoured of his new idol that ‘I used to want ...”

“... never came to such bad ends – unless, of course, they were minor characters, and required to ram home the hideousness of heathen ways. Each age has its own ideas about the kinds of reality children can, or cannot, bear: the Victorians didn’t shirk the reality of death, atrocity, having an arm and a leg torn off, all in the interests of Christianity; while ...”

“... preoccupations. As a set of practical proposals on how a society could make its members fully at home in the world, it has at all stages been beneath contempt. But as a somewhat fumbling attempt to express a central ideal of social relations (an ideal which no decent society can afford wholly to forget), it retains the greatest urgency. For one thing, it ...”

“... Hansford Johnson – caught, to begin with, in the unselfconscious prose of her adolescent Boots Home diaries, 8” x 5”, a week to a spread – gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping ...”

“... was a big part of his national appeal. More pragmatism, less BS. It’s the same argument Rory Stewart gave for quitting national politics in order to run for mayor of London, before the pandemic put a stop to that. Being mayor was the only way you could be sure you were making a difference to people’s lives. Emanuel sums it up: city government is ...”