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“... politicians to serve present purposes by rearranging light and shade on the historical picture. Christopher Addison, for example, published an edited version of his war diaries in 1934, just as he was trying to cut a figure as a Labour frontbencher. The originals had recorded the private thoughts of a man who expected to be on the winning side after the ...”

“... be caused by the mass voiding of faeces by honey bees?). Other items have seemingly escaped from Christopher Logue’s ‘True Stories’ in Private Eye: not just the tale about the Smethwick housewife but the one about Mr Elephigio Chikwana, of Harare, a spiritual healer whose speciality is to hoe up the ground at the point where lightning strikes and ...”

“... on the Clapham omnibus as readers devoured the Pitman’s Advanced Shorthand version published (as Christopher Matthew reminds us) that year. Jerome would surely have relished such a spectacle; or would he have felt, as the Almighty may have thought when the Bible was first rendered into Pitman’s, that the finer elements of the text must inevitably be lost ...”

“... that biography was an invasion of privacy. Lord Kinross began work on a life just before he died; Christopher Sykes took over, but later withdrew for reasons unexplained. At this point Mrs FitzHerbert, finding time heavy on her hands in ‘Aubrey’s old stamping-ground, the Middle East’, volunteered to tackle the papers; and we must all be very glad that ...”

“... centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and ...”

“... my destiny?’ It sounds like another search for identity – ‘the curse of the age’, as E.S. Turner recently remarked à propos of Gloria Vanderbilt’s autobiography. Well, at least this isn’t an autobiography – though perhaps it would be more amusing if it were. The first half traces the Tennants back to their origins as subsistence farmers in ...”

“... for Nuclear Disarmament and, on the first Aldermaston march, ‘walked with Doirs Lessing, Christopher Logue and Kenneth Tynan’. Twice he was arrested and Vicky drew him as a convict in broad arrows. The year 1968 found him with the insurgents in the Sorbonne, but in Britain ‘few shared my enthusiasm for the students of Paris.’ In many ways he ...”

“... the medical pretensions of spas or with the derisive accounts by visitors like Tobias Smollett and Christopher Anstey. They are sober accounts of planning, financing and building, of the labours of improvement commissioners; they offer analyses of population and of the proportion of masters to servants, along with statistics of ...”

“... another, but his recent novels are more concerned with reconciliation. In Atonement (2001), Robbie Turner – a 1930s Cambridge English graduate who has decided that Eng. Lit. isn’t everything, ‘whatever Dr Leavis said in his lectures’ – plans to go to medical school. He imagines becoming someone who embodies the best of both traditions, literary and ...”

“... Waugh and Wells, remember where they are? (They are no trouble at all, handling Muggeridge, Christopher Sykes and Douglas Cleverdon with tact and perspicacity.) Alan Bennett still smoulders over the tabloid oafs who pursued Russell Harty. He disdains to specify ‘the gravestone vulgarity’ from which Harty ‘never entirely managed to break ...”

“... In the current novel, there’s a sharp, unkind analysis of the contemporary English novelist Christopher Burns (‘shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 1989’): We discussed the way in which the labour of unsuccessful writers, artists and musicians valorises the bestselling efforts of those who succeed. Burns had negotiated his way through ...”

“... Othello in Addressing Frank Kermode is a particularly bad case. The books by Jackson, Harrison and Turner exemplify in various ways the kinds of problems which occur in a field where theory is so distant from practical reality. Jackson’s starting-point is his conviction that modern literary theory is founded on the work of Marx, Saussure and Freud, and The ...”

“... scenesters of all professions, the quick brown foxes who understand the game and like to play it: Christopher Hitchens, Michael Winner, Emin again and Jarvis Cocker, whom she wanted to impress so much when he came to her house, she hid the pot-pourri. But she’s a little nervous – though she pretends not to be – around the hedgehogs, such as Hilary ...”

“... Montjoy. Marie Mountjoy, of Silver Street, near the Barbican, ran a business with her husband, Christopher, making ‘tires’, ornamental headwear fashionable among ladies at court (‘tires’ were elaborate compounds of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”