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“... Bildungsroman, the life and impressions of one young man: he even gets born with a caul on him, as David Copperfield did. Serge, however, attracts no sympathy or empathy or whatever from his creator: he’s a convergence, or rather an area of concentration, where ideas, images, words, preoccupations gather and regroup. The book is split into four main ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... Swann Committee of Inquiry into the education of ethnic minority groups is attacked by Simon Pearce for reflecting ‘the anti-racist doctrine that disparate levels of educational achievement between ethnic groups are proof positive of discrimination,’ and for being ‘basically illiberal’; its ‘moral base’, he says, ‘throbs with all the ...”

“... and hence to a degree ridiculous. At the turn of the millennium not much had changed. In 2000 when Simon Russell Beale played Hamlet at the National Theatre, several reviewers muttered about too too solid flesh. Beale didn’t look neurasthenically thin enough to play a tortured young intellectual. Throughout the 19th century attitudes to the ‘stuff of ...”

“... harden English opinion against the Spanish. While he did not go as far as the Habsburg ambassador Simon Renard, who wrote to Charles V saying that the burnings had to stop, Philip had his confessor Alfonso de Castro preach a sermon at court in which he urged against the burning of heretics, recommending instead loving, persuasive conversion. But, as Duffy ...”

“... and far worse than London, were the new industrial ones. Analysing fertility and mortality rates, Simon Szreter and Anne Hardy judge that in places such as these the 1830s and 1840s were probably the ‘worst ever decades for life expectancy since the Black Death’; and they repaint the ever pathetic picture of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ...”

“... in response to what they saw as Protestant fundamentalism. As the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon remarked early on in a book that became a subversive classic among Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘the Books of the Bible that are come into our hands are but abridgments of the ancient Records, which were more full and copious, before the last ...”

“... a maddening book to read, and only someone who knows the biographies of Welles by Charles Higham, Simon Callow and others is likely to guess what Conrad is up to and why. Yet he is also writing criticism. Here the difference should matter between a line written as a writer writes and a line spoken as an actor reads. Even in a study like this (a scrambled ...”

“... end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and David Sheppard. In 1949, such was the craze for sport, 90,000 people turned up to watch the FA Amateur Cup Final. As Anthony Bailey, who watched Portsmouth when they won the League Championship two years running, fondly remembers, ‘football shorts were long and ...”

“... salmonella’). Then there is the long line of sex-scandal casualties: Cecil Parkinson, Tim Yeo, David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget ...”

“... had dabbled in professional music and drama, taking leading roles in a Harlem production of Simon the Cyrenian and a play about voodoo called Taboo, and singing bass with the Four Harmony Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic ...”

“... portraits of those with whom his varied career brought him into contact. He is no Saint-Simon, even of the smallest size; he shows no sign of entering incisively into the motives of those he observes, any more than into his own. And since the ‘few bits of contemporary history’ he ‘knew at first hand’ are treated in so personal a vein, there ...”

“... had been betrayed from within. Orwell, whose own record of events was dismissed by Claude Simon as ‘faked from the very first sentence’, feared that from this time onward history might never again be truthfully written. This was the war in which the Fifth Column was invented (by General Mola, boasting of his secret allies waiting to rise in ...”

“... buy a newspaper, began to back down and to deal with Ingrams for a settlement. Ingrams describes Simon Jenkins, then editor of the Evening Standard, bringing Goldsmith’s final peace terms to him in a coffee bar, when it looked as if Goldsmith might buy the ailing Standard. At that point, Ingrams, too, was ready to settle: The strain of an apparently ...”

“... dead. The sequence takes the form of a series of meetings with ‘familiar ghosts’. There’s Simon Sweeney, ‘an old Sabbath-breaker’ who urges him to ‘Stay clear of all processions!’ Heaney is nonetheless drawn into the trail of pilgrims for the island. On the way he meets the shade of Carleton:‘We are earthworms of the earth, and all thathas ...”