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“... Dangers of Deterrence, published in 1983 with the same editors. Both were designed, according to Nigel Blake and Kay Pole, to rescue a debate in which issues were being ‘extremely badly handled’ either because, though philosophical in nature, they were not being treated as such, or because, though they were recognised as philosophical, the treatment ...”

“... Olson. The original diary preserved in Balliol College runs to three million words. In 1966-68 Nigel Nicolson produced a three-volume edition based partly on the diaries and partly on his father’s correspondence. He used only a twentieth of the diary itself. The abridged version cuts out a good deal more but it also adds passages which for one reason or ...”

“... Here are two more spy books from authors who worked long ago for British Intelligence. George Blake was very left-wing, and is now slightly less so. Anthony Cavendish has always been very right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961 ...”

“... theatrical power of the piece must remain in doubt until next summer (by which time the composer Nigel Osborne should have got his act together), three or four of the lyrics make the libretto well worth ...”

“... halt inflation. The resignation of the entire Treasury team, Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch, in 1958, dismissed as a little local difficulty, has come to symbolise, especially in the monetarist mood of today, a fatal turning-point towards the downward path into stagflation and excessive public expenditure – all the tendencies which ...”

“... and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages ...”

“... wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin ...”

“... Going’ and so on. Then there come in turn Look back in anger, the ‘smart playfulness’ of Nigel Dennis, later developed by Orton and Stoppard, cultural despair variously expressed – for instance, by Herbert Read and Kingsley Amis; and then to the sorts of things about which Appleyard enjoys talking, such as Brutalism and Pop Art. He does not neglect ...”

“... as well as the poetry there were 20 detective novels published under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, three ‘straight’ novels, the adventure stories for boys, the four books of criticism – A Hope for Poetry (1934), Poetry for You (1944), The Poetic Image (1947) and The Lyric Impulse (1965) – and the various Virgil translations; the herd-instinct is ...”

“... is Raine’s The Electrification of the Soviet Union – a Pasternak adaptation set to music by Nigel Osborne. There is a certain admirable posturing about all this, a hunger for the larger canvas, the High Style. The writing and presentation of a verse play is fraught with traditional dangers of the kind T.S. Eliot encountered and Auden described when he ...”

“... being a Russian spy in MI5. Some say the spy was Sir Roger Hollis, the director. A man called Nigel West wrote a whole book saying the mole wasn’t Hollis: it was his deputy, Graham Mitchell (a former official of the Tory Party). Now we have another equally boring and unimpressive book by W.J. West, who says it was Hollis after all. This last book costs ...”

“... and the grand to be taken seriously by the literary establishment’. According to Enoch Powell, Nigel Birch deserves to be ‘remembered for his insistence on retaining the trees in Park Lane when it was widened’. Sometimes the choice of contributors can seem cosier than it might have been: Ned Sherrin on Caryl Brahms, for example, or Hugh Johnson on his ...”

“... they all turn out to have a significance beyond the obvious. (Other writers did this too: Nicholas Blake’s The Widow’s Cruise and Christianna Brand’s Heads You Lose are just two examples. Another favoured tactic was to repurpose quotations, as in Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop or Allingham’s Look to the Lady. Innes was proud that two of his titles were ...”

“... prime minister was a guest of honour when the conference rolled into Rome in 2020. Last September, Blake Masters – an unsuccessful Republican Senate candidate in Arizona funded by Thiel – told a private session at NatCon Miami that ‘Libertarianism doesn’t work. Totalitarian leftism doesn’t work either.’ The conservative commentator Rod Dreher ...”

“... by journalists heaving with indignation at secret service inefficiency and treachery. Nigel West’s book on MI6 looks by comparison, like an exercise in name-dropping. Not that Mr Andrew does not have his throw-away lines. Sir Claude Dansey, that unattractive deputy head of MI6, was, it appears, seduced at the age of 16 by Robbie Ross. Tom ...”