“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... a very large Israeli army, air force and navy from 5 June till the middle of August. This was a major political achievement for the Palestinians. Something else was at stake in the invasion, however, to judge by its results a year and a half later – results which include Arab inaction, Syrian complicity in the unsuccessful PLO mutiny, and a virulent ...”

“... as ‘single issue extremism’, distinct from organised left or right-wing activism. Now, major climate organisations are on the left of national politics in nearly every country, and are increasingly willing to connect environmental destruction to its systemic roots. These days, $43 million seems a paltry sum.Forests are consumed in wildfire. Salmon ...”

“... as to why Birmingham had been settled in the first place’. It had no fort, no castle, no major river, no cathedral. Until the 18th century it was overshadowed in size, wealth and importance by nearby places such as Coventry, Lichfield and Worcester. Ideally, a second city should present an alternative to the centre, a different set of values, a ...”

“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... late advocacy of eugenics. Foster is equally well informed about literary tradition. In his first major foray into Yeats studies, an essay called ‘Protestant Magic’ (1989), he placed Purgatory in a line of Irish Protestant Gothic that went back through Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the novels of Maturin. This instantly made sense of the melodramatic elements ...”

“... The Reverend Robert Boughton, readers of Gilead will remember, was the best friend of the Reverend John Ames, the narrator of that novel, which is written in the form of a memoir addressed to Ames’s seven-year-old son, Robert, a name given to him by his father in honour of his friend. Both Ames and Boughton are in their late seventies; Ames is the still ...”

“... argument and discussion. Mid-Victorian left-wing Liberals saw the intellectual as society’s major safeguard against the bogey they feared: stagnation, the stationary state – what Mill called ‘collective mediocrity’. ‘The great enemy of knowledge is not error but inertness,’ wrote the historian H.T. Buckle. ‘All that we want is ...”

“... have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his books, comes a sudden flash of intimacy almost painful in its nakedness: ‘I feel a sad sense of shortcoming at your good opinion of my writings & myself. I fear you do not know what a feeble person I ...”

“... a grip on the billions of bits that punk sparked off, from cider-swilling crusties to the music of John Zorn. But the result of all that labour would be an impenetrable slab of print, entirely out of kilter with the spirit and point of the exercise. Punk rock has been dealt with in print in three main ways. Early artefacts like Fred and Judy Vermorel’s Sex ...”

“... anthropologists as much as to historians. Trexler’s purpose is to describe and interpret the major rituals of Renaissance Florence, notably the civic rituals, such as the annual celebration of the feast of San Giovanni, the city’s patron, in which the commune celebrated itself; the official welcomes extended to distinguished visitors, such as the Duke ...”

“... career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk of the king’s works, deputy forester, justice of the peace for Kent and Member of Parliament. In addition to his large poetic corpus, we have several prose works and a few ...”

“... registers: ‘Successful shade, accept my hand in fraternal contrition! We are druv’ to it. John Bull will have it so. Tu l’as voulu John Dandin! And his lady still more! Let us toe the line, my brothers, and invest with care. Londres vaut bien une messe.’ Then catch at your own coat-tails. ‘An unpardonable ...”

“... of All Battles’. At the time, Operation Desert Storm appeared to be as close to flawless as any major operation in modern military history. Stormin’ Norman instantly became a national hero. He was Patton reborn: gruff, swaggering, volcanic, but above all a gifted fighter. Yet hardly had the shooting stopped than Schwarzkopf’s reputation began to ...”

“... of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A ferryman to whom ...”