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“... half-whisper that someone called Colm Tóibín was in the library looking at the correspondence of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me ...”

“... I was less than fifty pages into this first volume of John Betjeman’s Letters when I felt I must be in for an attack of tinnitus. I kept hearing shrieks of laughter. This condition was caused not by the poet himself but by the editor or Candida Lycett Green, his daughter, who seems to value nothing so much about her father as his ability to make people split their sides ...”

“... The relationship between Byron and his editor John Murray lasted a little over ten years. It began in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron’s name. (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he famously wrote, or is said to have written.) It ended twice: first, in the winter of 1822, when, after a number of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street ...”

“... signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”

“... and Straiton and the city beyond.In another sense, though, Edinburgh did adopt him. His talents took him to the Royal High School, where William Drummond, Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and ...”

“... of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is ...”

“... too much for the UUC – the governing body of the UUP. When Faulkner was ditched by the UUC, he took his followers in the UUP and went off to found the UPNI. James Kilfedder, another Unionist dissident who struck out alone, in 1980, founded the UPUP (pretty much a one-man band). Once the Loyalist paramilitaries went in for electoral politics we got the PUP ...”

“... continent. The East Asian experience of Sars had a similar impact on Asia’s governments: they took Covid seriously right from the beginning, and have the lower death rates to prove it.The best book​  about Covid from a global perspective is Tooze’s Shutdown. He focuses on the economic impact of the disease and the economic response to it. When the ...”

“... and offering an example not so much of historical as of anti-historical fiction. The real John Lemprière, whose Classical Dictionary was first published in 1788, was a Jersey man educated at Winchester and Pembroke College, Oxford. His Lemprière ancestors included a lieutenant bailiff of Jersey during the reign of Elizabeth, and a governor of the ...”

“... Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us ...”

“... On Saturday, July 30, Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential requisite to a good education. JOHNSON. ‘Most certainly, sir; for those who know them have a very great advantage over those who do not ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... As I took a break not long ago from putting the first draft of my dissertation on an Amstrad, I turned on BBC Television and saw my country cruising for a bruising in the Gulf. And yet on the same day I received a letter from America solemnly informing me of a spectacular line-up of planets in the astrological sign of Leo which was to herald a new era of world peace ...”

“... marriage to Anne Morrow, the daughter of Dwight Morrow – banker, ambassador and millionaire – took him into a more elevated society than that of Little Falls; Lincoln Kirstein, the balletomane, and his sister were part of it. Harold Nicolson also made a social judgment – though he found Lindbergh ‘as nice as can be’. He described him as ‘like a ...”