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“... comrades.And with a frog in her throat she replied– I’m behind you. One hundred per cent.The John Matthews of the poem ends up with a sentence of 15 years. Norma Kitson’s husband, David Kitson, was sentenced to 20 years for work connected with the early days of the ANC. Like Dulcie, she was a hundred per cent behind him and remained so. Her spirit ...”

“... they always sat opposite each other. No doubt he mistook his wife for a hat, and the liberal John Bright for the devil. While Disraeli practised a politics of spatial tension and betrayal as a form of funny joke, Salisbury saw nothing, but the end of all things. There is an honesty, a courteous form of self-exposure, in both these volumes. While ...”

“... On the evening of 15 February 1957, the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews stepped into a jeep with some anti-government activists and went to meet the young Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Castro was supposed to be dead: sailing from Mexico a few months earlier, he had arrived on the coast of Oriente province with 82 men, and was immediately bombarded by coastguard vessels and army aircraft ...”

“... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...”

“... a pylon, a purple sky. An invitation to an invisible art manifestation: Lost Memories by Emma Matthews. ‘Very elegant, very Paul Klee,’ the punters say. Rusting English metal, from somewhere down the A13, near Rainham Marshes, rendered as a grid of delicately balanced reds and pinks, with just enough green to cancel the headache. This, so often, is ...”

“... more serious and scientific than love notes.) The second example is a murder mystery about John Gower by Bruce Holsinger, which takes a different tack.2 Chaucer is glimpsed; he is a calculating and casual character, shallowly obsessed with his literary reputation and erotic conquests. The daring comes partly from making Gower – whose literary image ...”

“... of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger literary ...”

“... But I wish I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward ...”

“... 1955-6 at Caltech, as a graduate student in physics. This was the period when the recently formed John Birch Society was active in San Marino, a mile or two away from the Caltech campus. Pierce was evidetly much impressed by a Birchite novel circulating at the time, The Franklin Papers, whose plot anticipates The Turner Diaries. Both novels derive from Jack ...”

“... The ‘Stefan’ who was hovering during the raid on Craig Wright’s house and office is Stefan Matthews, an IT expert whom Wright had known for ten years, since they both worked for the online gambling site Centrebet. In those days, around 2007, Wright was often hired as a security analyst by such firms, deploying his skills as a computer scientist (and ...”

“... Simon Darcourt: he is a priest, a bachelor, and a professor of Greek in the College of St John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly known as ‘Spook’); he is also a man of acute observation and humane understanding. In addition, since much of the action of all the novels derives from Francis Cornish’s life and accomplishments, Darcourt provides a sort ...”

“... Sir John Junor made his reputation mainly as the man prepared to be more bitchy about famous people than any other newspaper columnist. This was the basis on which he conducted his column on the Sunday Express, the paper he also edited for 32 years, and which underpins its less successful appearance nowadays in the Mail on Sunday ...”

“... own demands and imposes its own exclusions. These are carefully pointed out and demonstrated by Matthews, Feinstein and Odling-Smee, and by Solow and Temin in the Cambridge volume. Immeasurables tend to become residuals (and hence very difficult to relate to anything real). Solow and Temin are frank: ‘The usual routine, in the absence of anything ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris ...”

“... Could he find any of these people, we asked? Yes, he would try. The following week Jo Mennel and John Morgan, the reporter, went back to interview the Rhyl witnesses on camera. Over a cup of tea in a café, Terry Evans gave them the disappointing news that he could not find the main man he was looking for, a newspaper-seller called Charlie Jones. As the ...”