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“... with the ‘time of old sin’ – whether a fantastical Alma-Tadema-ish Ancient Rome, or a John Addington Symonds Athens, where pederasty was not merely permissible but praiseworthy – drifted, for those who survived their heady youth of Baudelaire and absinthe, into the Aesthetes’ religion, in which chalices and smoke played their part. ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... on land at Crécy (1346, followed by the capture of Calais in 1347), at Poitiers (1356, where King John of France was taken prisoner, and which Sumption reconstructs superbly), and the Black Prince’s final ‘disastrous’ victory at Nájera in Spain (1367). The story also has its decisive turning points in politics and diplomacy, starting with the ...”

“... and confident a vision of America’s role in the world or its responsibilities at home as John Kennedy. The liberal confidence he and, for a time, Lyndon Johnson came to represent produced, in the early Sixties, an impressive array of domestic and foreign initiatives. The liberal agenda was an ambitious one, but at the time few doubted the nation’s ...”

“... isn’t like Rochester. If Rochester in the ‘Allusion’, and Shadwell in The Medal of John Bayes (1682), accused Dryden of clumsy attempts to ape the rakish idiom, some of the written specimens weren’t in the least clumsy. This couldn’t be said of the play’s dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such ...”

“... impressions of Mantegna’s prints has long been observed, but it was first pointed out – by Godfrey Evans, in an unpublished Courtauld Institute MA Report of 1977, which Landau properly credits – that early impressions, if examined under magnification, turn out to be ‘drypoints’, not engravings, and so were made with a sharp instrument handled not ...”

“... retrospective of Richter’s work at Tate Modern is a great event. It is beautifully hung by Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota: packed tight and relentless room after room, by the end exhausting, and in this entirely true to Richter’s half-century of effort. The selection of work could not be better, with things often seen before enlivened by juxtaposition ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... tell you how awful it was. This period has now gone down in history as the great renaissance, with John Osborne, the Royal Court, but most of the time, night after night, you would go and see wretched actors, and there would always be something in the play like ‘God, is this never going to end?’ and Gallery Nell would seize her chance. One of the most ...”

“... as terrifying guarantors of American power over China and Japan. The Man who Ended War, by Hollis Godfrey, features a radioactive beam that can ‘dissolve’ whole navies, but which is harmless against the human body and no threat to civilisation. Kipling also imagined ‘the mass destruction that delivers happiness’. In ‘As Easy as ABC’ (1912), he ...”

“... of them focusing on the nature of animal consciousness or our relationships with other species. John Bradshaw’s In Defence of Dogs (2011), Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014), the primatologist Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) and the ‘scuba-diving philosopher’ Peter ...”

“... a piece of Kenyan history of which no one could have been ignorant.In 1934 the issue was raised by Godfrey Benson, Lord Charnwood, a Liberal politician, who shared his concerns with the Colonial Secretary, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, and asked a question in the House of Lords. ‘What really interests me is the impression which the defence, as reported ...”

“... characters – near enough to tell us what we need to know about Antonia or Jim or the professor, Godfrey St Peter, but not so near as to infringe on their privacy or essential dignity. She observes her characters respectfully, as if across the width of a farmhouse supper table, or from a distance equivalent to that between one furrow and the next in a neatly ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”