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“... Gladstone called it), and some in Gordon Haight’s magisterial work as editor and biographer. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston have now provided a very welcome and complete edition of all the diaries and journals, covering the years between Eliot’s union with Lewes in 1854, when she was 35, and her death in 1880. Only around a quarter of this ...”

“... Then, in 1669, Evelyn, aged 49, met a 17-year-old Maid of Honour of the Duchess of York called Margaret Blagge. She enters the diary first as ‘the excellent Mrs Blagg’ and then rapidly becomes ‘my particular Devota’. In 1672 she asked the diarist to look after her affairs, to be her ‘friend’, and to regard her as his ‘child’ (her father had ...”

“... In the dismal mid-Seventies Patrick Cosgrave, later to be Margaret Thatcher’s adviser and biographer, took me to a Friday luncheon at the old Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts ...”

“... What Tory MPs really wanted,’ Margaret Thatcher writes of the Westland affair, ‘was leadership, frankness and a touch of humility, all of which I tried to provide.’ A great deal of indignant energy has fired the reviews of this book, many of them by Mrs Thatcher’s former Cabinet colleagues, largely because of the sheer outrageousness of those claims to frankness and humility ...”

“... all, in equally essentialist terms, as the Oriental mystic who taught Americans to do yoga. Ruth Harris, who confesses that she has never taken to yoga, argues that both representations miss the point. Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years between ...”

“... woman have in the past been numerous but in the main soft-centred, preoccupied – as Frances Harris puts it – with her ‘tempestuous personal relationships’. Harris’s own book, by contrast, is founded on careful research in some twenty-five different archives on both sides of the Atlantic. As a curator of the ...”

“... are distressed to find the word ‘cunt’ used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from Britain to the former colonies, a way, shall we say, of normalising, even dignifying such laxity in the naming of female parts, in preparation for future press briefings by ...”

“... paused only at the three sacred sites that anchor Atlanta’s claim to world fame – the homes of Margaret Mitchell, Martin Luther King Jr and Coca-Cola. Seen through Rutheiser’s ironic, cold eye these nodes mark the fault lines of a disintegrative urban history. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the most popular ...”

“... candidate is hardly necessary; after the primaries, he was no one’s candidate, really. The Biden-Harris ticket was like being handed one of Gary Larson’s Cow Tools and being screamed at for not knowing what to do with it. ‘Look at him,’ I murmured during the debates. ‘He looks like God’s grandpa. He looks like he just got a Botox injection into the ...”

“... Ong on subway graffiti, and the section opens with a splendidly passionate and ambitious piece by Margaret Doody on the revision of the hymnal used by Princeton University Chapel, a booklet called ‘Inconclusive Language Hymns’ which is produced by the First Congregational Church. From here, Doody strikes out boldly into territory of wide aesthetic and ...”

“... lamé skirts and pink brocade. The black velvet dress with the ruffle collar would be perfect for Margaret of Anjou. Burberry has no drama at all. It’s not the fault of the collection, which has a sort of glam rock decadence (the 1970s are much in evidence on Bond Street this autumn), but of the lack of imagination in the half-empty windows. The plainness ...”

“... that was all he knew and all I needed to know. In anthropology two experiences stand out. Margaret Mead recalled that when she was a girl she and her sister foraged excitedly and a bit furtively in The Golden Bough because Frazer was the only author in their parents’ large library with anything to say (in English) about sex. It also seemed a good ...”

“... Mullah’ of Somaliland, who was bombed into submission within a week. Arthur (Bomber) Harris was a squadron leader in the Third Afghan war of 1919, and pioneered the strategy of ‘control without occupation’ in Iraq, which entailed sprinkling fire on straw-roofed huts: ‘within forty-five minutes,’ ...”

“... sizable audience. The Nightfisherman, a selection of Graham’s letters by his friends Michael and Margaret Snow, with 19 poems, photographs, drawings and his essay ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’, is the most useful and revealing book on the poet yet published and sets out the clearest record of his life. Graham was born into a blue-collar family in ...”

“... No political leader can be understood in isolation from his or her opponents. For Kenneth Harris,* unfortunately, the Social Democrat and Labour leaders have only walkon parts in the drama, and frequently, as in the case of Scargill and Livingstone, are presented as caricatures, deserving mention only on the list of victories scored by the Prime ...”