“... 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 ...”

“... a few months after Princess Ratibor became his fifth wife, he complained to her cousin, the actor Peter Eyre, that she could be ratty and was frequently boring. Then he made a pass at Eyre. He took on tougher opposition with Number Six, the ferocious minx Barbara Skelton, part-original of the lethal Pamela Flitton in A Dance to the Music of Time. She had ...”

“... from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown … in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression – all these had existed, did ...”

“... or restored to remove scratches. But it never puts colour back into the cheeks of the dead: Peter Jackson’s dazzling transformation of the monochrome archive in They Shall Not Grow Old could not be further from Akomfrah’s mind. His actors warn us that remembrance comes in many guises, some of them unreliable. (He hints, too, at the allure of parade ...”

“... of their parents.The question of children’s historical agency is fraught with complications. Read one way, Orme’s book presents us with a record of spirited resistance. As a boy in the 1520s, Peter Carew was sent to school at Exeter, staying in the household of a city alderman. He grew to hate his host, and one day ...”

“... family, fulfilment through consumption and a white, white Christmas: even if you’ve never read Yates or Cheever or Salter, generations of cinematic art, from Hitchcock to Lynch, have prepared you for the nastiness below the surface of stuff like this. You assume there’s a dark underbelly, and there is. Betty is on her second marriage. She broke with ...”

“... Not having a book on the go I take up again Larkin’s Letters to Monica which I’d tried to read when it first came out but given up. It’s more interesting than I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and what they had both really meant. The letters date ...”

“... friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De Quincey was touchy, quick ...”

“... though not much elsewhere. Badly-educated English-speaking philosophers like myself (the kind who read long books in German only if they absolutely have to, non sine ira et studio) owe a great deal to Robert Wallace. He has translated eight hundred pages of very tough German as lucidly as literalness permits. (We also owe a lot to the MIT Press series ...”