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“... a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not ...”

“... in two distinctive ways. Her narrative starts with one foreign fleet in the English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling ...”

“... about the resurgence of xenophobia and racially motivated violence in a newly reunified Germany. Stern reported on a 16-year-old girl who justified her part in the riots by saying: ‘If Gypsies had been burned to death, it wouldn’t have bothered me.’Casual racism against Roma after reunification was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ...”

“... Day’ publication, ‘Civilians and Barbarians’) from Spenser’s slurs on the Irish (‘stern and savage’) to certain terms bandied about today: ‘terrorist’, ‘bomber’. Brian Friel, another of the ‘Field Day’ directors, does something similar in his play, Translations, which isn’t only about the act of translating place-names from ...”

“... but his record of opposition to Fascism and Stalinism is a perfectly honourable one, and J.B. Priestley was not exaggerating when he said in a funeral oration that the ‘prophet of this age of transition’ was mourned by men and women of all races. Yet to Michael Coren (who, to do him justice, quotes Priestley in full) Wells’s influence on his ...”

“... of the war, Alsop reflected bitterly that he might no longer be able to claim the standing of stern prophet and moral tutor to the military-industrial (and military-intellectual) complex. Berlin responded in the same tones of seasoned statesmanship:I can see the thin red line, formed by you and Mac and me, and Chip Bohlen – four old blimps, the last ...”

“... remarkable philosophical meditation, often poignant in its belatedness; and as a letter to Philip Roth. ‘The history of Jewish literacy: now there is a delicate subject!’ Wieseltier exclaims. ‘It turns out that rabbis have been complaining for centuries that the book has often been closed to the people of the book.’ It might seem a bit offhand ...”

“... Clementine, however, in 1935, while on a Pacific cruise, had a platonic affair with Terence Philip, a worldly and handsome art dealer, which Mary Soames frankly recounts in one of her editorial interventions, but to which there is no reference in the letters. ‘Don’t be disloyal to me in thought,’ writes Churchill to Clementine from HMS Enchantress ...”

“... at least, a political response. Misogyny can animate, and very powerfully and interestingly, as in Philip Roth’s work. The dismaying thing about this collection is that Updike appears to be ascribing a value to adultery which it no longer has. In these stories, men of the present are recalling the late 1950s, ‘that era just before the Pill’s liberating ...”

“... the Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls them, ‘a conspiracy of nobodies’. It is a bittersweet story, and one that goes far to explain why most modern architecture is so awful. Like Sydney, the Opera House was a British idea. Sir Eugene Goossens, the violinist and ...”

“... finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab ...”

“... what seem to be her extravagances, we must remember that she was also saying, all along, some very stern and quite unextravagant things about what we have been doing to our minds and hearts. ‘Almost with each passing day,’ she wrote in her essay about the Columbia uprising it becomes harder for liberalism to claim that it has been adequate to the tasks it ...”

“... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign ...”

“... 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an account that involves roads and railways, schoolrooms and stern instituteurs, and the production of homogeneous ‘Frenchness’ (as both reality and myth) from the diverse terroirs that still existed in 1870. It is either a version of modernisation theory, as some of its critics have claimed, or a sly account of the ...”

“... read and influential thinker of his time. Kings and cardinals queued and competed for his company. Philip II of Spain made him historiographer royal. Rubens, his devoted pupil, painted him as the modern Seneca; and it was through the medium of Lipsius’s edition and commentary that Seneca reached a wide European audience. Lipsius’s own version of Stoic ...”