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“... Lord Sommers loved Perry,’ Newcastle wrote with heavy underlining. Many​ of the letters in Stephen Bernard’s meticulous edition owe their survival to Tonson’s Victorian heirs, who began auctioning off the most saleable manuscripts in the 1870s, as the family fortune dwindled. The rump of the archive was pulped for newsprint during World War ...”

“... In the summer following the death of Leslie Stephen in 1904, his daughter Virginia lay in bed, listening to the birds singing in Greek and imagining King Edward lurking naked in the azaleas, shouting obscenities; that same summer she apparently attempted to kill herself by leaping out of the window. ‘I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,’ she wrote to a friend when the crisis had passed ...”

“... Milne and Lord Berners, and ‘The Child at Home’, discussing Victor Gollancz, Augustus Hare, Stephen Spender, Winifred Foley and Neville Cardus. These categories are speculative instruments rather than immutable structures, and they might give way if pressed too hard: but they provide a genuinely helpful way of organising the material. Cockshut ...”

“... decisions and turning-points of the reign, is often scarce and open to interpretation. George Bernard’s argument frequently proceeds by assertion rather than argument and proof, but, knowing how difficult the record is to interpret, he always asserts what is, in his view, plausible, rather than certain. For example, there is no record of the royal ...”

“... for the new complete edition of Orwell, and has a critical Introduction and annotations by Bernard Crick. Davison reports that Orwell wrote about fifty pages of the book in the summer of 1946: the novel in its first form was typed in the summer of 1947 and completed by October. Between the middle of May 1948 and early November 1948 Orwell revised the ...”

“... from Peter Burke, is thick narrative. First he sets up his characters: Abelard himself; his enemy Bernard of Clairvaux, saint and, on Clanchy’s showing, insufferable rhetorician; his lover, short-lived wife and long-lived correspondent Heloise, niece or daughter and ward of Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame. Then we have the story, which, unlike weaker-minded and ...”

“... to the Home Office by the Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship, chaired by the philosopher Bernard Williams, which advances a case for moral pluralism. The Labour-appointed committee found itself addressing a newly elected Conservative administration which dispatched its findings swiftly into the long grass.It is not obvious why Hilliard takes this as ...”

“... in order to establish a common style and tone, couldn’t resist announcing that Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw would be writing for it. In 1925 the Spectator, after not quite a hundred years of unsigned articles, abandoned anonymity, and the New Statesman followed. Articles in the TLS remained anonymous until 1974, and obituaries in the Times and Telegraph ...”

“... The manifest ambivalence of the proposal recalls his well-known offer of marriage to Virginia Stephen some seven years before: an offer no sooner made, he told Leonard Woolf, than ‘I saw that it would be death if she accepted.’ On that occasion, he had immediately followed up his abortive proposal by suggesting that Leonard marry her instead; and he ...”

“... thanked me a thousand times’). Then there is the splendid book edited by Richard van Emden and Stephen Chambers, which consists mainly of soldiers’ and sailors’ letters and diaries, British, Anzac and Turkish – no French or Indian, apart from a couple of Indian officers in the British army – arranged chronologically, with an editorial commentary ...”

“... about it, and an orgiastic one, where one is cosmically-life-affirmingly-overwhelmed by it, as Bernard Levin is. What we are talking about when we talk about opera becomes an intriguing moral moment. People who talk about it well seem to do it very well, to be able to be large-minded and yet sceptical at the same time. (True Wagnerians do not think that ...”

“... compensation culture has arisen …’The term seems to have originated in 1993 in an article by Bernard Levin in the Times. Subsequent research found that instances of its use by the press had by 2004 risen from almost zero to more than 450 a year. In 2004 the Better Regulation Task Force, reporting on routes to redress, subheaded its report ‘Compensation ...”

“... officials – with the minister of defence and the chief of defence staff in attendance – Bernard Emié, the head of DGSE (the French equivalent of MI6), joined the press conference, much to the surprise of the journalists present, and screened a video recording of a ‘strategic’ meeting of al-Qaida-affiliated leaders that had taken place somewhere ...”

“... street different smell.’ Now ‘too’ has its force justified. On 568/648 Bloom and Stephen are reading the Evening Telegraph, Stephen the letter on page two from Mr Deasy about foot-and-mouth disease, Bloom an account of the third race at Ascot: While the other was reading it on page two Boom (to give him ...”

“... of the mountains, as there is immorality in the miasma of a marsh.’ His great rival, Leslie Stephen, future editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, put in a word for the morals of Fen dwellers (would he have defended the goings-on at Sodom, a thousand feet below marsh level?) but he, too, saw mountaineering as an ennobling pursuit, not to be ...”