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“... had a real chance of success. The triumph of liberal democracy was not predestined. Like Norman Davies in his monumental Europe: A History, Mazower gives ample space to Central and Eastern Europe, redressing the balance of countless conventional histories. Above all, as its deliciously subversive title suggests, this is the story of a ‘dark ...”

“... cosmos, an integral factor in a prolonged, and possibly insoluble, post-colonial schizophrenia? Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who ...”

“... to repeat the prewar practice of idealising the monarch through masques, the attempt fell flat, as Paul Hammond has explained. Dryden shared the unease that Hobbes and Sir William Davenant had expressed after the execution of Charles I about the destructive potential of ‘inspiration’, a quality that was now fatally associated with the ‘fanaticism’ of ...”

“... it gives me the fidgets.’ But his intellectual curiosity was nothing like as studied as that of Paul Nash, a somewhat patronising friend, who construed metaphysicality if not surreality wherever he chanced to look. Nash came to live near Rye in 1925 and, Burra gleefully reported, was subjected by his wife to the local music scene: ‘He said my dear must ...”

“... Misanthropocene). It has already ‘picked up a variety of incompatible meanings’, as Jeremy Davies, a professor of English at Leeds, observes in The Birth of the Anthropocene, perhaps the best guide so far to the different senses and timeframes attached to the term. Even so, a common intellectual function seems to unite the various usages and, often, a ...”

“... comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer, with profuse footnotes displaying considerable scholarship and intermittent pedantry.As Heffer says, Channon was seen as ...”

“... story it was me. At 5.30 the next day Jamie arrived at my flat with his editorial colleague Nick Davies. (Mental health warning: there are two Nick Davies in this story. This one worked for Canongate; the second is a well-known reporter for the Guardian.) They had just come back on the train from Norfolk. Jamie said that ...”

“... the vaults of Barclay’s Bank in a trunk deposited in 1820 by Byron’s Cambridge friend Scrope Davies. The latter series, dated 1809-19, are more obviously entertaining. To read them after the Greek letters is to be carried back to the Byron of the delightful third volume of the letters, that real-life Liaisons Dangereuses which covered the episode in 1813 ...”

“... bonds of good fellowship in the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by ...”

“... in 1661, had done 18 years in prison himself and had ‘grounds for feeling vengeful’; that Paul Cobb, the seemingly feeble Clerk of the Peace who tried to let Bunyan off, went on to become mayor twenty years later when Charles II decided to get rid of his own obstinate ‘hardliners’; that over the years Bunyan’s congregation managed to carry out ...”

“... family through an advantageous marriage in 1677 between Sir Thomas Grosvenor and the heiress Mary Davies, who also brought with her other London lands which later became Pimlico and Belgravia. Enjoying enormous natural advantages of location, from which indifferent early management could not detract, Mayfair was developed from the 1720s, and by the end of the ...”

“... Kingsley Amis called Dylan Thomas’s life, the life told by Thomas’s first thorough biographer Paul Ferris, ‘a hilarious, shocking, sad story’. Thomas was very important to the Amis-Larkin club partly because he seemed determined not to be seen to be taking anything, including himself, too seriously. In 1941, Larkin refers to Thomas coming to the English Club at Oxford: ‘Hell of a fine man: little, snubby, hopelessly pissed bloke who made hundreds of cracks and read parodies of everybody in appropriate voices ...”

“... on ‘white-collar crime’ by the late John Spencer, and an important critical essay by Paul Hirst on the inability of orthodox Marxism to theorise the joint-stock company. None of these interventions did much to ground their discussion in the developing realities of economic crime in Britain. This particular project was only taken up with any ...”

“... hundred by the Beatles. Jackson bought the catalogue against stiff competition, including that of Paul McCartney, in 1985, and it is said to be worth a fortune, though perhaps it’s worth more than money to Jackson, who proved by purchasing it that he was bigger than the Beatles, who were once said to be bigger than Jesus. What explains Jackson’s journey ...”

“... written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected ...”