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“... chains, there is always a risk of despondency. Fortunately, a cure for the blues is now to hand. Michael Foot’s collection of biographical essays is a joy to read. From Heinrich Heine to George Orwell, from William Lovett to Jennie Lee, Foot ranges from the prophets of the 19th century to the politicians of his own day. The enemies of promise are ...”

“... of adolescent males talking balls, the careers of Novalis, Oken and their English version, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, give reasons for contentment. For those interested in other things (of which failure and confusion may form part), one important focus is the scientific centre of much Romantic thought. For Romanticism may one day be seen, not as the refutation ...”

“... as we know both from later memoirs about the passing on of the title role from Burbage to Joseph Taylor and from records of performances in the 1630s for Charles I’s court. Even after London’s playhouses were closed by the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, an anonymous adaptor produced a truncated version suitable for surreptitious performance at fairs and ...”

“... so-called Chandos portrait as an image of Shakespeare painted by a friend and fellow actor, John Taylor. Donated to the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, the Chandos is the only candidate to have been granted much credence, but new ones continue to surface, most recently the Cobbe Portrait, which formed the centrepiece of the evocatively titled Shakespeare ...”

“... Conrad, Henry James and others; final illness and death. The chief woman in Crane’s life, Cora Taylor, belongs to the English period too. But it all hinges on Linson’s daybed. The daybed was along a windowless wall covered with drawings, prints, oil sketches and a wooden artist’s palette. The room was full of late Victorian clutter: an end table ...”

“... as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams of a vividness and thrust that I hadn’t experienced since I was in the Army. My well-intentioned friends in Poland ...”

“... exhumed and gave a new lease of life to writers such as Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Comyns and Antonia White. White’s Frost in May, another study of the horrors of convent life, was one of Virago’s first notable successes when it was reissued in 1978. Other writers she championed had truly been forgotten: on Desert Island ...”

“... opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... other selections from his working drafts. Yours Presently, the new volume of letters edited by Michael Seth Stewart, shows Wieners cutting across various groups in American avant-garde writing.‘A homosexual,’ Wieners wrote, ‘since he has been a stigma or outcast freak for so long, does not [usually] have a chance to meditate upon himself, even as a ...”

“... enterprise: some of the contributors are no sort of Marxist (David Marquand, for example) and two, Michael Rustin and Paul Hirst, are politely but firmly critical of the New Times thesis. It says something about their editorial style that no attempt is made by the editors to answer or even comment on Rustin and Hirst, though their criticisms are very ...”

“... to the experience of the last 12 years. In his conclusion, Holland cites a phrase which A.J.P. Taylor applied to India and Pakistan and suggests that Northern Ireland is a ‘non-historical state’. Its population exists and suffers in the kind of ahistorical vacuum which Eliot imagines in ‘Little Gidding’:     A people without history Is not ...”

“... Europe, the Mediterranean and the Far East – a dilemma very well summed up in Professor Michael Howard’s essay on British military preparations for the Second World War. In these circumstances, the policy of appeasement becomes more comprehensible. The moral condemnation which it provoked at the time fades away when we are confronted with the ...”

“... which they are introduced. This whole cast of mind has enjoyed an extended reprise in the work of Michael Oakeshott, which repeatedly advises us to consult practical experience and, when we come to explore those ‘intimations’, as he calls them, which invite us to embark on reform, to be well aware how fragile are the ‘platforms of understanding’ on ...”

“... UK Power Networks and SGN. A number of other former Labour MPs work as industry lobbyists. Michael Dugher is chair of the Betting & Gaming Council – an industry that has donated almost £400,000 to Labour since Starmer ran for leader. ‘I’d be shocked if there isn’t a lobbying scandal in the first year,’ a veteran lobby journalist who covered ...”