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“... understaffed, the Bari base – under the command, as it happens, of another Communist, Major James Klugman – had to decode and re-encode all traffic between Frank and Cairo in both directions. The matter of the code-books was at last sorted out, just before Frank and Sergeant Scott crossed the frontier into Bulgaria, when they were immediately involved ...”

“... Orwell’s political prose to the kind of scrutiny ordinarily reserved for the novels of Henry James. John Sutherland has been reading and rereading Orwell ever since the 1954 BBC dramatisation of Nineteen Eighty-Four alerted him to the novel’s existence. So he feels under no constraint either to bless or to damn a writer whose ...”

“... A Game at Chess, making it the greatest box-office success of the period, and infuriating King James. Middleton wrote A Game at Chess in 1624, in the wake of the Spanish marriage crisis, and after some ten years of close association with the City, first as the author of its pageants and then, from 1620, as its official Chronologer. Miss Heinemann ...”

“... is real’ – his sole invention being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s ...”

“... made it a full decade into the next), she was born in 1912, the only child of the English actor James Dale (best known as the voice of the coincidentally named Jim Dale in Mrs Dale’s Diary), and in 1937 she married Guy Ramsey, a journalist and competitive bridge player. She was a devoted secretary to Rumer Godden, with whom she shares a lean style and ...”

“... manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in ...”

“... are venial. And so we have the statement that Claverhouse was defeated at Killiecrankie, that James V died in a Border skirmish, that before 1707 Glasgow merchants had taken over the tobacco trade, that the 18th-century Highlanders were Catholics. There is also a confusion between the Covenant and the Act of Union, which would not have been committed in ...”

“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas ...”

“... Complaint’ is simply too bad to be Shakespearean but competent enough to be the work of John Davies of Hereford, a minor poet whose admiration led him to assimilate his style to Shakespeare’s. Whether the case for John Davies is finally accepted, there can be little doubt that Vickers’s clear and forceful study ...”

“... of Rye, the cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint ...”

“... Moyles is a throwback to the larger-than-life DJs – Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Gary Davies – who dominated the nation’s airwaves and seeped into its consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s, despite being the kind of men many people might think twice about spending quality time with. Indeed, Moyles’s path to the BBC is so conventional ...”

“... from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary, O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms ...”

“... he is all of the showbusiness spectacles we have ever known rolled into one: Barnum & Bailey to James Brown, Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Temple, and David Blaine, and Peter Pan, all the way back to Neverland. We want to see him as pop’s greatest distortion of human nature, which he may be, but isn’t he also the most interesting person on the ...”

“... in movements of this kind: precipitation, bonding and legitimation, functions emphasised by C.S.L. Davies and by S.M. Harrison in his account of the supposedly religionless rising in the Lake Counties. To restrict ‘religion’ in the 16th century to matters ‘spiritual’ and to ‘Catholic idealism’, even to exclude the preservation of monasteries as a ...”

“... with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well ...”