“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... funny account of provincial literary neurosis, had appeared in book form in 1972, and Peter Carey’s ‘American Dreams’, a post-Vietnam satire, in 1974. David Foster’s first novel, The Pure Land, came out in 1975, and, deceptively to one side in the same year, stood Johnno, David Malouf’s first prose work. ‘It spread, throughout the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”