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“... for ‘sinking’) was characteristic of the Italian madrigal after 1550. English madrigalists took up the habit, but Weelkes is laughing at it, too. Yes, he can mimic the words’ meaning by his use of melodic shape, harmony, rhythm and dramatic contrast, but he can also make them deny it – and he does this twice. The first time the voices sing ...”

“... mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings was over before the younger ones started to play, although he was still around as they became famous. This English angle was partly suggested to me at the time when Hughes’s penultimate novel, intended as the first of a ...”

“... did these events really happen, or was the climactic one a self-induced fantasy, something that took place only in Mary’s mind? Kipling tells the story as if the wounded airman were real, and the reader, too, accepts it for a fact, but critics have pointed out that he is more likely to be a hallucination, and have admired the way in which Kipling handles ...”

“... comments on Hamilton’s Scottish provenance, something that had never occurred to me when I first took to him. His father had been an eccentric and a ‘character’, whose powers of acting and sermonising had been complimented by no less a connoisseur than Henry Irving, but who must have been a terrible father, particularly at moments when he ...”

“... In June of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy ...”

“... for the last time. Twenty-one years later, as if to testify to how real the danger was, death took two determined nips at the Nabokovs’ heels: their last Paris address, 59 rue Boileau, was destroyed by German bombs three weeks after their departure; the ship on which they escaped to America, the Champlain, was sunk by U-boats on its next ...”

“... 1830-1870 (1957), a manual which was influential among students of the Sixties. Houghton’s book took as its starting-point the fact of a collective Victorian mentality – a kind of public overmind. Although this Victorian mind might contain oppositions within itself (the so-called ‘Victorian debate’), it was nevertheless governed by structures of ...”

“... seemed just a little less febrile, she could have passed in the outside world for vivacious. ‘John,’ I said, noticing how dull my voice sounded – and I wanted to say more, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘John,’ she repeated, smiling. She gave me a long, appraising look. ‘So. What are you in ...”

“... and … do openly the most secret necessities of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since ...”

“... led to an attack on Dryden in Rose Alley by hired thugs of Buckingham, the Zimri of the poem, was John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, a moderate royalist who did rather well out of the whole imbroglio. He was the author of An Essay upon Satire and An Essay upon Poetry, in the first of which Dryden almost certainly had a hand. Together with his own essays and ...”

“... witnessed the ‘discovery of the individual’ while Medieval man’s self-consciousness simply took corporate form: ‘Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, a people, a party, a corporation, a family.’ This view is no longer held in its crude state, and sophisticated work by Colin Morris and other Medievalists has made a strong case ...”

“... Whitehead is black and comparisons were made to Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed. John Updike has called him ‘blithely gifted’, ‘the young African-American writer to watch’. Whitehead’s new novel, John Henry Days, is longer and more ambitious than The Intuitionist, and the suggestion in its title ...”

“... often.’ Margery Dayrell worried that her son Nathaniel could not sleep, though he was drowsy. John Windmill complained that he ‘cannot sleepe nor take any rest on his bed or up or Downe’. Hugh Thomson feared that his son, ‘who he supposeth to be taken or planet stroken’, had been unable to sleep the previous night. Broken and disrupted sleep could ...”

“... paint the keel of Lord Muskerry’s yacht – and were ravished by its landscapes. Ettore always took his violin with him to London. ‘When I got off the train they would look at me with respect at the station. Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, or the Queen’s Hall? Whereas the car would take me to the furthest and coolest of the suburbs, where I delighted the ...”

“... do a great deal of research,’ Rupert Thomson tells us; the research for Air and Fire evidently took two forms. The narrative centres on the quixotic attempt by a disciple of Gustave Eiffel to build a modernist cathedral, based on the Tower’s logical steel geometry. This would be unsurprising in 1890-something, except that this architect chooses to build ...”