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“... but now I think, emphatically, that he was right. In fact, it isn’t possible to come away from Andrew Adonis’s crisp and affectionate Life with any other impression. Adonis is naturally more light-footed than Alan Bullock was in his three-volume masterwork on Bevin (Bullock only allotted Hitler a single, though memorable, volume), but the picture he ...”

“... is that the garden city happened at all, and even had progeny. Factory villages like New Lanark or Port Sunlight made sense. But an entire new town on a bare patch of Hertfordshire, unsponsored by government or industry, was lunacy. Hunt retells some good anecdotes about early Letchworth, though his story that Lenin visited it is a canard. Like most ...”

“... en Blanc Majeur’, and ‘Arrivals, Departures’ echoes Baudelaire’s ‘Le Port’. It is quite true that Larkin’s brand of rhetoric, as it suddenly flowers at the end of poems like ‘Absences’ (‘Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!’), ‘Next Please’ and ‘High Windows’, has the sound of French eloquence, or rather a ...”

“... Marriage, mortality, memory, the onset of middle age and the pressure of children criss-cross Andrew Motion’s latest collection. Should we treat the vivid images and incidents that comprise this volume as fragments to be fused into a unity? We might try to construct a single protagonist: a man entering mid-life, married, a father, aware of his own mortality and that of others, slipping at moments through the doors of memory into his childhood, into his adolescence, into an earlier, failed relationship ...”

“... backwards and forwards across the broad river, between the bustling international container port of Tilbury and Gravesend, the historic sump of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, feels like a subliminal tribute to Thatcher: little visited now, but with persisting memories of the days when she was overwhelmed with paying passengers. Perhaps there is a nudge ...”

“... royal ventures better than the Castello di Miramare, a neo-Gothic meringue outside the Adriatic port of Trieste which was confected from not one but two vanished empires. The Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the Habsburg emperor’s brother, built and decorated Schloss Miramar as a celebration of his ancestry, complete with a painting in which bearded ...”

“... to keep the lads of Dublin and Glasgow engrossed. (Almost at random, page 68: ‘We walked along Port Royal until it became Montparnasse, and then on past the Lilas, Lavigne’s, and all the little cafés, Damoy’s, crossed the street to the Rotonde, past its lights and tables to the Select.’) The experience of writing his books gave Hemingway the chance ...”

“... takes its title from an obscure event that occurred on 16 November 1776. An American ship, the Andrew Doria sailing out of Maryland, put into the Dutch Caribbean port of St Eustatius. The vessel flew the flag of the Continental Congress, and instead of being turned away as the British had demanded – St Eustatius was a ...”

“... the period already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician or storyteller, or to an ...”

“... next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong – Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, records that Boris was a quiet boy who had hearing difficulties – and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the ...”

“... There was little to suggest, twenty-odd years ago, that Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T ...”

“... a single arch was to allow ships of two hundred tons to pass beneath it, and thus to extend the port of London as far as Blackfriars. The design was for the most part enthusiastically received. According to one Edinburgh professor, there was ‘nothing like it in the whole solar system except the Rings of Saturn’. But the huge expense of constructing the ...”

“... rural villages full of peasants and fanners, such towns – especially those, like Irvine, with a port – were growing into mercantile centres, full of trade in foreign goods, full of the sound of organised industry replacing the eident toil of the family cottage. Roads needed improving, old wooden houses were torn down and replaced with brick garrets. The ...”

“... the columns of journals, at university conferences, and at public and private meetings ever since. Andrew Wilson had already written an effective narrative of the 2004 uprising in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2005), where he acknowledged that the protests against Yanukovich’s fraudulent 2004 election were pre-planned (exit polls, steward training, the ...”

“... miles from the Danish settlements on the coast of Greenland, further than that from a Siberian port, 750 miles from the nearest fur-trading post and hundreds of miles even from any Inuit settlements. But Parry did his best to keep his men healthy and occupied: there was regular exercise, lemon juice and sauerkraut to ward off scurvy (not entirely ...”