“... John Carey has had access to voluminous archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took a long time to achieve an understanding of how truly remarkable he was, and then did so only fitfully ...”

“... the ordinary world to an odd angle: a magus stalks Bloomsbury; a celestial vision appears in a North London drawing room; people travel through time; they consort with the embodied presences of Plato’s Ideas. The best of his poetry (the part of his work he was proudest of and believed to be the most original) presents the Arthurian myth of the Holy Grail ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”

“... with each other, Cunard – photographed by Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Curtis Moffat, Cartier-Bresson, John Banting and others – was one of the figures in whom they converged. Gucci’s ‘Hard Deco’ line for Spring 2012 was launched in homage to ‘Louise Brooks and Nancy Cunard’. This edition of her poems chooses one of Moffat’s photographs for its ...”

“... are of special interest because of the doubts that assail their apparent finality. Could the North have lost the war by winning it? American politics often suggest this is the case, without any help from the counterfactual imagination. The war, Gallagher says, was ‘lamented as it was being fought and regretted in recollection’. The case is quite ...”

“... flourishes harking back to past dramas of domestic discord, but Paulet’s great-great-grandson, John Paulet, the fifth marquess, had to use the fortifications for real. At the start of the civil war in 1642, Basing House’s aesthetic virtues were second to its strategic significance, namely its command of the main road heading west from London. To puritan ...”

“... they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for torture (when John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant and Protestant, was incinerated after torture in 1531, More – by then lord chancellor – imagined ‘a hot firebrand burning at his back, that all the water of the world will never be able to quench’), one recent ...”

“... world. Why should peers and baronets be prominent in the British elite of 2024? Take Sir (Walter) John Scott, 5th baronet, countryside campaigner and snuff manufacturer (‘chairman of Sir Walter Scott’s Fine Border Snuff, 2012-, chairman of North Pennine Hunt 2008-’). Google suggests that Sir ...”

“... church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s – when John Donne, not yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent ...”

“... is a Laysan albatross that still hatches a chick every year on an island midway between Asia and North America. She is thought to be 69 and to have flown a distance equivalent to circumnavigating the Earth 120 times.It isn’t known whether the albatross already belonged to Robert Edmond Grant when he started to put together his collection in 1827. Grant ...”

“... this well-sourced biography. He spent most of this period at home, a detached Victorian house in North Queensferry, a village looking across the dark waters of the Firth of Forth towards Edinburgh, where his political career had begun. He said and wrote little for public consumption about the reasons his administration had failed, after seeming to start so ...”

“... rivalries at court. The most commonly cited examples are the long-running dispute in the North between the Percy family of Northumberland and the Neville family of Westmorland, and the open hostilities in the West Country between the Courtenays and the Bonvilles. The fact that Percy and Courtenay were fundamentally Lancastrian while Neville and ...”

“... calls itself the City of the Titanic, as indeed it was, but it has clearly broken out of the dying North Atlantic trading economy whose long decline, and the consequent sectarian battle for working-class jobs, was the economic basis for the current cycle of the Troubles, dating from the hungry 1960s. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, once the busiest in the ...”

“... town. Most of the changes which gave us the modern criminal trial, and which are the subject of John Langbein’s book, came about in the last part of the 18th century and the first part of the 19th. Their legal and practical effect from 1822 to the present has been tracked in the 54 editions of the Criminal Pleading, Evidence and Practice of ...”

“... pretension. Swift’s jailbirds and chimney-sweeps took the place of shepherds and milkmaids; in John Gay’s mock-pastoral The Shepherd’s Week, published a few years after ‘A Description of the Morning’, unpoetic swains and maids sing about turnips, potatoes and the intricacies of cheesemaking. The centrepiece of the second book of Alexander Pope’s ...”