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“... incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also.’ The ‘grotesqueness’ of the Gothic is part of the playfulness Ruskin values. But it cannot be separated from darker impulses: the difficulty … which exists in distinguishing the playful from the terrible grotesque arises out of this ...”

“... Horsfield briskly explores the conflicting attitudes to housework over the last two centuries. Her book introduces us to many attendant ironies – for example, the failure of labour-saving devices to do anything of the sort. It could also be described as a front-line dispatch in the war between men and women. ‘Woman hath much starched up man from his ...”

“... discovered it at the bottom of the same chest in the beginning of the reign of his present Majesty’. (‘His present Majesty’ was George III.) Among the drawings and manuscripts in this superb collection are the famous folios of anatomical drawings. The other major collection is the Codex Arundel in the British ...”

“... on the sports cars Jarrell so much fancied. Mary Jarrell has done a loyal and meticulous job, her comments on friends and situations are humorously vivid: but she also leaves the surface of the literary life quite undisturbed. There is no trace here of the competitive insight which produced the memorable portrait of Gertrude in Pictures from an ...”

“... feeble or unhealthy in their personalities, they were not ‘adequate’ to cope with the full majesty of Gore’s achievement. It was a size thing, as it always is with these Americans. British critics just aren’t big enough to grasp what’s going on up there. In one sense, people like Mailer and Vidal are indeed built to a larger plan than ...”

“... to overthrow the monarch – few Tudor risings had that aim – but to restore his influence in her counsels. The ensuing fiasco was over by nightfall. By the next morning Essex was in the Tower. On the afternoon of Saturday, 7 February, the day before the rising, eleven or so of his followers, having eaten at ‘one Gunter’s house over against Temple ...”

“... master to come out from behind the secret door. ‘Can I depend on the oath of my officers?’ His Majesty enquired. ‘Yes,’ came the reply, spoken in unison. But as the door in the panelling opened, Aleksander fell in a hail of bullets. Queen Draga collapsed on top of him. The soldiers were not finished, however. Drawing their swords, they slashed away at ...”

“... has less than two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ‘reigned, firstly’, from 1927 to ...”

“... doubling of the title is echoed in the ambiguity of the opening: this is a world drained of majesty and magic, which at the same time registers their continued ghostly presence. Hoban is happiest working in flickers and shimmers. The word ‘flickers’ becomes central to the plot of Fremder (1996), a piece of sci-fi ostensibly about the mechanics of ...”

“... altogether, but this one is of unusual interest. It is in Cordelia’s speech responding to her father’s question about which of his daughters loves him most – well, to be precise, which of his daughters he is to say loves him most. He is not asking for an answer, he is asking for a show. The connection between Shylock and Cordelia rests on their ...”

“... of Elinor Rumming, a work of frenetic energy about the disgusting practices of an ale-wife and her customers. In the beguiling series of lyrics contained in his Garland of Laurel, which were addressed to the various high-born ladies in the household of Sheriff Hutton Castle, this poet who rejoiced in his admiration of Chaucer and his academic title of ...”

“... reacts to the dumb-show, or why, in the final scene of Measure for Measure, Isabella maintains her deafening silence when her supposedly dead brother reappears. But in Jenkins’s vocabulary ‘infer’ is a dirty word, which he reserves to characterise, and dismiss, other critics’ arguments, and he cannot see that he ...”

“... both of them. S. is an epistolary novel, told in letters and tapes by Sarah Worth, who has left her stuffy East Coast doctor husband and gone to Arizona to join the Ashram Arhat, a religious community trying to build a permanent base for itself in the desert. (The portrayal of the ashram owes something to Frances Fitzgerald’s book Cities on a Hill and its ...”

“... of John Buchan by Gertrude Himmelfarb in an essay in Encounter in 1960, and Janet Adam Smith in her biography of 1965, the mud stuck. By the end of the Sixties in England, John Buchan was sinking towards oblivion, the sort of forgotten bestseller (like Phillips Oppenheim) you find in seaside rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of ...”

“... figures in the lesbian haut monde. A friend of mine once had dinner with Elizabeth Bishop and her lover. Another met Marguerite Yourcenar. At Yale in the 1980s one of Blakey’s best friends slept with – well, perhaps you can guess. (True – the closet case actress!) Someone else I know went to a party in a Chicago highrise and both Martina Navratilova ...”