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“... make us wish he had written more and painted less, Haydon describes standing high up on Hampstead Heath on the day of Princess Charlotte’s funeral. Below him through the sunny autumn mist he heard the church bells ring then all at once subside – ‘a distant sinking like aeolian harps and I immediately imagined the people all in at prayer’. The Regency ...”

“... in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at ...”

“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full ...”

“... the biographising of Anthony Eden is one of some interest. He offered the task to the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, author of many major books including a study of the Munich crisis and the official biography of George VI, who agreed on condition that he would not be expected to publish in Lord Avon’s lifetime. By a tragic irony of events Sir ...”

“... have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and morally – Sandhurst and the years in India and Africa ‘must be counted among ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”

“... Heathcliffish ways, causing all manner of disorder. Early graves are common. There’s no tameless heath, but the equally tameless ocean is a serviceable substitute. Stoddard’s recalcitrant characters have no truck with feminine docility, political edification or religious consolation. Her work is a reminder that Emily Brontë has enjoyed a wider influence ...”

“... by Desmond Rice and Arthur Gavshon, and Messrs Secker and Warburg to interview Rear Admiral Sir John Woodward and Commander Christopher Wreford-Brown DSO, Royal Navy, about the sinking of the General Belgrano; and if he will make a statement. Mr Stanley: As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said to the hon. Gentleman on 21 February 1984, the ...”

“... Years later they could still recite the words of the Eton Boating Song and passages from John Evelyn’s account of the Great Fire of London. Caribbean schoolchildren knew that the best commodities were English, from medicines and neckties to crown-embossed mustard jars and the brilliantine which they applied so liberally to their hair. Caribbean ...”

“... authority as leader had been weakened by three general election defeats out of four attempts, Ted Heath, party leader from 1965 to 1975, was still able to count on the loyalty of his most likely successor, Willie Whitelaw. While Whitelaw waited, Margaret Thatcher struck, and had built up considerable momentum by the time Whitelaw could bring himself to ...”

“... of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up past the turf-covered rings of Flower’s Barrow, and then turns off towards ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... awestruck by the philosopher Owen Barfield, and had a quite saintly manner of carefulness with John Berryman, but, these things apart, the volume is quite fogged over with Bellow’s notion that replying to letters was nothing if not a complete and utter waste of time. To Ralph Ellison: ‘I’ve never enjoyed writing letters. Vasiliki says that ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”