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“... In 1929 Wilson Knight wrote an essay ‘Myth and Miracle’ which deeply impressed T.S. Eliot. So deeply, in fact, that Eliot offered to persuade the Oxford University Press to publish Knight’s essays and to write an introduction for them himself. The result was The Wheel of Fire, one of our century’s seminal books on Shakespeare ...”

“... Some years ago, during an American Presidential election, rumours began to circulate that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development ...”

“... then working as office managers for a British-owned gold, copper and silver mine in Mpanda. Pieces of plaster were falling off the wall, the room was juddering and, outside, their houseboys were shouting at them to get out of the building. Barbara suggested it might be an earthquake but Mary disagreed and said that the boys ...”

“... On 9 February, an exhibition of remarkable new photographs by Josef Hoflehner opens at the Atlas Gallery in London. The pictures show interiors of the base camp huts built and lived in between 1901 and 1912 by Scott’s and Shackleton’s polar expeditions ...”

“... In opposition, Harold Wilson spoke out against American involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else ...”

“... Asked​ in an exam at the age of 16 whether kings should be elected, the future Edward VII answered: ‘It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning ...”

“... 1960, ‘fit for free characters to live in.’ The Good Apprentice carries within it an apt image of itself as a house. Seegard stands in a coastal fen within sight of the sea. Architecturally it is singular and original, the creation of Jesse Baltram, an artist ...”

“... Much the best way to convey appreciation of Alexander Cockburn’s rousing and combative prose is to quote him at length. The protocols of reviewing, however, preclude such a practice, so one has to resort to the altogether drearier method of describing what he is about ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... When​ the 22-year-old Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle in 1831 he took a copy of Paradise Lost with him, and over the next five years he read it many times, in Brazil, Patagonia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Mauritius. As the ship’s naturalist he sent commentaries and specimens back to colleagues in London, who soon came to see him not as a dilettante but an extremely acute observer ...”

“... and Europe from the mid-1840s until her death in 1861. Late in life, she charged more for one of her ‘lectures’ than Charles Dickens could command for his readings, and her doings would be reported in the same paragraph as news of Queen Victoria. Her fame was huge and preposterous. In an age before the moving ...”

“... Time was when the leadership of the Tory Party passed smoothly and gracefully from one incumbent to the next, as the old leader, full of years and honours, felt moved to bow out and the new leader duly ‘emerged’. Behind the scenes, of course, it was often more tetchy, but appearances were decently kept up ...”

“... In ‘Indian Killer’, Sherman Alexie’s second novel, two members of the Anthropology Department at the University of Washington in Seattle exchange banalities in a parking lot: ‘Dr Mather!’ said the white man as he approached. ‘Dr Mather, it’s me. It’s Dr Faulkner ...”

“... Britain’s​ early Enlightenment, between the 1680s and the 1750s, was the golden age of ‘projectors’, the name given to promoters of speculative schemes, some for making money, others for human betterment. After the Civil Wars of the 1640s the ingenuity which had once been applied to calculating the date of the Creation and the timing of the Second Coming was increasingly applied to more earthly concerns ...”

“... The most terrifying comment made on the Abdication may well be that of Lord Beaverbrook, writing twenty years after the events in which he played such a prominent part: if the British people, he said, had been less absorbed in the affair of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson the energy thus saved might have been used to avert world war ...”