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“... seem like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs ...”

“... who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ticket Kennedy would not have been elected. Consequently, without Graham’s intervention there might never have been a Johnson ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... from their earliest days, carried the seeds of their own disintegration. This is no reason why we should value his thought any the less. Victorian gentlemen of a particular kind – successful and complacent – patronised Ruskin. Dean Liddell of Christ Church was among them (‘He may be a great Drawing-Master, or a ...”

“... Leyburn turns out to be a High Recognition Area, and as I walk past the church two middle-aged WI-type ladies come out and their faces light up. ‘Oh, do come and have a Lenten Lunch. Very simple. Delicious soup. All home-made!’ Actually I wouldn’t have minded the soup but can’t face the chat, though in the event I can’t settle on anywhere else to ...”

“... slow down and at least half a mile to change course. If it was a barge being towed by a tug, and we drifted on to its towing cable, the Grey Ghost would be torn in half. If the tanker hit us, we would be torn apart by the impact and they wouldn’t even feel it.’ The ‘soon afterwards’ of the mishaps and threats can ...”

“... It was best on growing up in New India – the sights and sounds of Bombay, the remnants of John Company and the Victorian Raj, the displaced image of the American West on Eastern cinema screens. Less packed and less subjective, Shame translates the author’s consciousness (‘I have been borne across’) to the other side of the cultural divide. The ...”

“... was the invention of Jean-André de Luc. Rudwick is almost neurotically concerned that we should not apply our modern view of geology to the work of the 18th century, when the subject simply didn’t exist. Instead, there were geognosts, like the celebrated Abraham Werner from Freiberg, who were interested in local rock structures and the ...”

“... file into a building two blocks south. I pushed the production schedule ahead two months so that we could print the bulk in China and ship them back in a boat, but we printed some in Indiana too. I visited the press in Crawfordsville, the town where in the 1870s Lew Wallace sat under his favourite beech tree and wrote Ben ...”

“... each of us in any part of the world, foreign correspondents were our link with current events. We found out about wars, revolutions, floods and famines by reading the work of these colourful characters who, with their trenchcoats, typewriters and suitcases, moved from capital to capital sniffing out the news. Writers like H. R. Knickerbocker, Malcolm ...”

“... his heirs. Henry certainly needed all the heavenly help he could get. Succeeding his father King John while still a child of nine, and hastily crowned at Gloucester with improvised regalia, he had himself recrowned several years later at Westminster. He was to remain preoccupied with the symbols and reality of royal legitimacy for the rest of his ...”

“... Cranmer would also have called the Church of England ‘Catholic’, but in the sense that John Calvin or Heinrich Bullinger would likewise have called their Churches ‘Catholic’: they were all parts of the Universal Church which had rejected the medieval corruptions of the Church of Rome in order to regain an authentic Catholicity. Many ...”

“... Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the hero of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he means is that money is destroying him. Self-destruction (along with several of its hyphenated pals: indulgence, interest, loathing) has become Self’s hobby, what he does in his spare time, and what he spends his money on ...”

“... and finding one’s balance, and then wondering if one has really grasped the thing after all. John Donne’s poems in particular are extremely unstable. Critics have often got into a sweat about the way that they argue implausible cases, and very often, too, things happen in the course of them which make it quite clear that while the speaker is busily ...”

“... as he paints his portrait of Cornish within this lesser frame. Now, with The Lyre of Orpheus, we pick up temporally where Rebel Angels left off. As for Francis Cornish’s biographer, Simon Darcourt: he is a priest, a bachelor, and a professor of Greek in the College of St John and the Holy Ghost (familiarly known as ...”