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“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as ...”

“... digression, exposition, all done with stylish dispatch, admirably rendered by the translator, John Howe. Closer to a looped sequence of essays than a memoir, the book nonetheless shows off the memoirist’s skill to stunning effect in three somewhat unflattering portraits – Castro, Guevara and Mitterrand – and reminds us that distance and ...”

“... of ‘God Save the Queen’ on the Thames, a rebellious parody of the Royal River Pageant. John Lydon won himself a place in British folklore. But for all the mock outrage over the Pistols’ anarchic antics and seditious lyrics, none of those involved – among them Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood – faced criminal charges. The performance was ...”

“... and was charged with deep meaning by many prelates and intellectuals. At Vatican II, John XXIII himself dwelt lovingly on the universality, antiquity and majesty of the Latin language, which Providence – so he argued – had led the Church to adopt. Catholics, then, were bombarded every Sunday with a form of Latin that came to be, in some ...”

“... these are serious questions, requiring patient and scholarly rebuttal? Afrocentrism, says Stephen Howe, comes in two varieties. The first is an interest in Africa and its culture reinforced by the belief ‘that Eurocentric bias has blocked or distorted knowledge of Africans and their cultures’. Although it has been around for some time, it has been most ...”

“... It is also true that many of G.R.’s articles in the National Reformer are boring digests of John Stuart Mill, Drysdale’s new intellectual hero, not only on economics but also on epistemology and ethics. The Elements of Social Science continued to prosper in the marketplace, however. It sold as well as, or slightly better than The Fruits of Philosophy ...”

“... and competing political tendencies; between little Englanders (such as Richard Cobden and John Bright) on the one hand and chauvinist imperialists (such as Lord Palmerston and Joseph Chamberlain) on the other; between a maritime and peaceful trading nation and a military-imperial superpower; between a petit-bourgeois electorate, fired by the ...”

“... withdrawn, and had seven bishops sacked. When the new Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), went to plead the cause of Catholic schools, he took with him a map of France with all the under-funded Catholic schools marked in red. De Gaulle sent him packing: ‘This map is the map of France. It is therefore up to the French, and not a foreign ...”

“... their arm and said: ‘Listen!’ I’m glad I was alone, because, so help me, it was only Elton John. The music was so nearly drowned out by the ship’s engines that I’d just caught the top notes. I bent down, stuck my ear to the speaker and yes, it was Elton John, singing, of all things: ‘Don’t let the sun go down ...”

“... he sought to animate his own fables. In ‘Of this time, of that place’, the college teacher, Howe, has two such exemplary ones among his pupils: Tertan, an original, perhaps brilliant, but wholly unstable creature, and the horrible Blackburn, a clean-limbed undergraduate type who is adroit, insensitive, dishonest and on the make. ...”

“... govern the whole question of military exports to Iran and Iraq for the duration of the war. The ‘Howe Guidelines’ (after the Foreign Secretary) were as follows: 1. We should maintain our consistent refusal to supply any lethal equipment to either side. 2. Subject to that overriding consideration, we should attempt to fulfil existing contracts and ...”

“... Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality ...”

“... and Lawrence Urdang move from one dictionary house to another. Oxford (with R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins ...”

“... his most celebrated poems were written from literal translations supplied by James Hardiman, John O’Donovan, Eugene O’Curry, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh, Samuel Ferguson and other sources. It is impossible to know how Mangan could have written so many poems and essays in a few years beset by ...”

“... helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 ...”