“... of a century, a decent send-off. It’s a great turn-out for a notorious homosexual predator who Peter Tatchell, somehow, never got around to outing. George Cornell’s efforts in this direction (both sexist and weightist) having murderously backfired: ‘fat poof’ was an ad lib that was exposed in a dramatically public act of political correction. But say ...”

“... reminded Corbière’s admirers of Villon. Verlaine noticed this affinity, and Pound, who had read Verlaine, passed it on. Randall Jarrell returned to the comparison in a brief essay on Corbière, published in Poetry and the Age, where he praised the ‘cruel and magical tenderness’ of the verse. The figure who emerges at the end of the poem to embody ...”

“... alive, which made parishes with elderly vicars especially attractive. One newspaper notice of 1817 read: ‘Valuable church preferment – To be sold by Private Contract, the Right of the Next Presentation to the Vicarage of St Andrew, in the borough of Plymouth, in the County of Devon … upon the avoidance thereof of the present incumbent, who is nearly ...”

“... age, the present threatening political and environmental situations, or my having lately read John Gray’s highly unsanguine Straw Dogs* – I cannot see why the discovery of extraterrestrial life would any longer be such a prodigious deal. Fascinating, certainly, but not miraculous; and certainly not (in Goodwin and Gribbin’s words) ‘arguably ...”

“... has predecessors within the Zionist establishment. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick noted that the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini (a sworn enemy of both Zionists and British colonialism, who had met with Eichmann and had great expectations of a Nazi victory), was depicted in Gutman’s Encyclopedia as one of ...”

“... to finish. ‘Why have so many of Britain’s great cities fared so badly in the 20th century?’ Peter Clark, the general editor of the series, asks in his preface. Turn the page, and Martin Daunton’s introduction descends with unconcealed relish into the ‘decay, corruption, stench and stickiness’ of the early Victorian city – a hell from which the ...”

“... Mann’s story, and despite its tragic ending, the work represented for Britten ‘everything that Peter and I have stood for’. Kitcher’s sympathy with literature is not untypical of contemporary philosophers. It leads him to claim indeed that literature can do – can be – philosophy inasmuch as it shows rather than tells, as against philosophy’s ...”

“... Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for the modern security services. But then Read’s three-volume study of 1925 reflected his own political preoccupations and professional ...”

“... keen to emphasise. ‘No Renaissance artist, with the exception of Andrea Mantegna, was able to read or write Latin.’ This is a bold claim, considering how little we know about most artists of that period, and not hard to challenge (Alberti wrote a treatise in Latin), but, if slightly qualified, the assertion would be salutary. The same applies to a claim ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... Mantel plays with a degree of ambiguity at the beginning of the book, that we are meant to read them as literal devils is never really in doubt. And what of Satan himself? Beyond Black offers us a typically understated portrait of the Fiends’ ringleader, a man called Nick. Returning home to the squat one day, Al meets an individual she has never seen ...”

“... empire, by contrast, was a sideshow. Rodger occasionally pushes this argument too hard. Read carefully, his own text makes clear that while empire in this period certainly did not drive the navy, the empire would not have developed in the same way without it. Thus, for all the failings in the Caribbean in the 1720s, 30s and 40s, it would have been ...”

“... been a revelation: ‘The first thing my eye fell upon was a review of a book by Gertrude Stein. I read a quotation and found it like a foreign language, partly illuminated by the Holy Spirit.’ In Dublin in 1931 the Celtic Revival was still in full swing, and Kavanagh’s style at first suited it nicely. He was welcomed into literary society as the authentic ...”

“... politics over the last 120 years. They are based on intensive original research, are easy to read and well worth reading. Wherever he ranks as a philosopher, Green is a first-rate historian. But his essays do not, I think, confirm his claim that all through the 20th century before 1975 the Conservative Party was ‘steeped in ideological dispute’. They ...”

“... do not even bother to refute me.’ It’s all a little too like the exchange in Casablanca when Peter Lorre’s character says to Humphrey Bogart’s: ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ To which Bogart replies: ‘If I gave you any thought, I probably would.’ Last year there was a series of more distressing revelations, about the ties of North American ...”