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“... the close, and Henry James is going to address over four hundred letters to him. He weathers two major storms, one emotional and the other resulting from a rash claim that if not a poet he is at least a scholar. Becoming Librarian of the House of Lords, he luxuriates acceptably amid aristocrats in stately halls. His last public appearance is in January 1928 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... officials and ministers more regularly and co-operatively than at any time in the Thatcher-Major period. But they do so on an issue by issue basis. They have almost no representative presence in the British state. There is no longer a National Economic Development Council – flaccid beast though it was – on which they could have equal status with ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... after 1860 and especially in the years after 1870.’ But this statement is from the foreword to John Ruskin: The Early Years, 1819-1859 – the only volume so far issued. The general judgment seems to me to be right. What might meanwhile be useful is to reflect on the changing perceptions of Ruskin, from the vantage-point of this latest and evidently ...”

“... enjoy?) the condition are known – include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Nabokov and Hockney. John Harrison’s Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, a scientific and historical study, is due from Oxford in March. The condition has been dismissed by at least one anonymous ‘notable scientist’ as ‘romantic neurology’, but in the foreword to ...”

“... Hone had also just written and published three parodies of the Book of Common Prayer: The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany and The Sinecurists’ Creed, which satirised the venality of Tory MPs willing to say, vote for and even believe whatever their ministers told them to in exchange for the sinecures and ...”

“... both are made by the individual, who puts himself into them, puts in his ‘life illusion’, as John Cowper Powys called it, his unconscious fears and desires. History will not work without fiction, or at least the fictive principle, which Scott renounced as far as he could. This of course amounts to choosing a principle of another kind, but a negative ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith ...”

“... of his own listeners. ‘Detecting sexism in the writers of the past,’ he writes, ‘forms a major part of the literary-critical endeavour nowadays.’ Above all, he ridicules ‘that sad tendency people have to want to believe that in the past everybody thought just one thing until, by a wholly inexplicable process, they suddenly all changed their minds ...”

“... and that Bosie was rumoured to have taken to an eyeglass, after reading the case of a Major Parkinson who cut his throat with a bit of glass in a Holloway cell. Max’s was a tough, unsentimental world, but could combine both feeling and elegance with toughness. If Max really was leading a double life – a pleasurable but hardly tenable ...”

“... is the most commonly recorded reaction. (Ironically, cooling the new generation of electrics is a major technical problem: Ford’s ‘Ecostar’ prototype, with which it had hoped to beat EV1 to market, burned up when its advanced-technology sodium sulphur batteries spontaneously combusted in 1994.) Electrics are still suffering from the problems which ...”

“... If it had not innovated, there would certainly have been a government-promoted Plan for Coal. No major industry could be allowed to languish. But, as Michael Flinn points out, it was not with the actual process of mining that 18th-century government concerned itself, but with the trading of the product. The coastwise traffic in coal was the largest activity ...”

“... polite: this table-rapping, spirit-summoning Rosicrucian was a lot sillier than most of us. Few major modern writers have been, in terms of their intellectual interests, so completely off the wall. But Yeats was one of the last great self-fashioners, and it is never quite possible to know how far he credited his own scrupulously cultivated absurdities, or ...”

“... system. Clark appeals to those who like their art easy, Wind to those who want it difficult. A major factor in Clark’s success was that he wrote about works of art which his readers knew to be outstanding even if they could not always say why. This is particularly evident in his famous television series Civilisation. The title gives the impression that ...”