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“... under the stairs. Shockwaves are wrinkling the water that isn’t there. Stone-in-Oxney for George Newson At a table which seems to take root in the lawn We breakfast late to a single propeller’s drone, The ghost of a Spitfire over Stone-in-Oxney Or a Stuka, its turning-circle that cloud-gap Or wherever you point to show me a bird, its dive Low as the ...”

“... Most of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and murderers’, as Archbishop Michael Francis told me last year. According to the Accra guidelines, sitting politicians are not allowed to stand for election, but there have already been shameless manoeuvrings. ‘People come here and shake my hand,’ Klein says, ‘and they say they want to ...”

“... feature came to be the provision of music, which is fascinatingly discussed by Stanford Lehmberg. George Herbert went twice a week to Salisbury Cathedral, ‘and at his return, he would say that his time spent in prayers and cathedral music elevated his soul and was heaven on earth.’ Cathedral choirs sang the difficult music of Tallis, Byrd and ...”

“... According to one early theory, the reason some of the murder sites were close to branches of Michael’s, the craft-store chain, was that the shooter wished to be thought of as the Archangel Michael, expecting the cowed populace to recall the name’s meaning (‘who is like God’) and to realise the end was nigh. The ...”

“... her early death from cancer, in a rush of love. There seems to have been nothing problematic about George Thomas’s relationship with his mother, even if he has dedicated his memoirs not to her but to the Mother of Parliaments. His mercifully long-lived Mam was, he tells us in his first paragraph, ‘the single most important influence in my life’, and that ...”

“... George Clooney’s The Ides of March is a slow and modest political drama that often feels like a faster and better thriller. There’s no crime, just misbehaviour and deals and dangerous knowledge, but it generates quite a bit of the suspense and discomfort we associate with crime movies. We don’t want the truth of the story to be true, and we wish the characters would not act in the way they have already set about acting ...”

“... a haunted history stretching from 1774 to the present: the author, Jean Stein, and her co-editor, George Plimpton, of the Paris Review, acknowledge the familial dimension by providing a ‘genealogy of principal characters’ near the end of the book. The founding father was Judge Theodore Sedgwick who came to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who ...”

“... careful, non-intrusive touch of the directors (Mark Sandrich for Top Hat and Shall We Dance and George Stevens for Swing Time); and there are the differences among Irving Berlin (Top Hat), Jerome Kern (Swing Time) and George Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is some amazing dialogue (in this case by Allan ...”

“... after the death of either man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster. They were two of the stars of Victorian literary journalism: much in demand as editors, and absolutely reliable in their capacity to produce essays and reviews of first-rate quality on a huge range of topics at an intimidating ...”

“... as an editor. His narrative is entirely about being taken seriously by Elton John, Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none ...”

“... Tribalism may soon become the determinating factor in White House decision-making as well, for George W. Bush and his entourage don’t deal in shades of grey. As far as they’re concerned, the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, us and them, are perfectly clear; and within this world of absolutes the family feud is alive and well. After ...”

“... than Hugh Gaitskell was ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. These descriptions, by Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan respectively, reveal little more than the effects of personal irritation on imaginative Welsh politicians. In his final chapter Professor Wasserstein draws attention to ‘a fundamental innocence’ and ‘supreme intellectual ...”

“... was obviously investigating that enormously important, mysterious and unexplored Victorian figure: George Drysdale. She was certainly doing this as well as I was – perhaps much better. Worst of all, the spoor was old, the campfire ashes long extinguished. It appeared that any minute the world would hear, if not the whole truth about ...”

“... and natural selection, and also the narratives of certain Victorian novels: especially the work of George Eliot and Hardy, which is taken up in the last two-fifths of the book. Mrs Beer does not want to say that Darwin’s new biological history is on the same footing as fiction; she has too much respect for the veridical power of Darwin’s great hypothesis ...”

“... The cool, courteous Alexander Kinglake and the hot, contentious George Borrow are two of the best-liked and most influential travel writers of the 19th century. They were contemporaries for much of their long lives (Borrow died in 1881, aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination ...”