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“... You must have escaped in a hurry dropping so many little intimacies from our lives – thermal vests, long johns, a lace camisole, a black bow-tie, a packet of Tampax on the floor beside the bed, my old tennis-shoes (were your backs done in too?). I picture your arrival, through the rockery, sinking your feet into heather, shrugging off rhododendron branches, strands of honeysuckle; prising open the sash with an iron bar, your bodies folded like contortionists among slivers of glass and wood ...”

“... voiced against the French Communist Party, make an affirmative answer distressingly plausible. Stephen Wilson’s large and learned book, in which he studies the political, social and intellectual aspects of anti-semitism in France at the end of the 19th century, is therefore very timely, as is the reprinting of Dreyfus’s recollections of his ...”

“... a salutary shock. Miracles and canonisation procedures are among the many subjects discussed in Stephen Wilson’s extremely useful anthology of articles on the saints and their cults. The ten essays reprinted in this volume include the classic study of St Besse by Robert Hertz and the no less important reflections on ‘the sociological study of ...”

“... disputed, and/or cannot be enforced? This is the problem addressed by both these excellent books. Stephen Wilson’s canvas is narrower, but it enables him to ground his analysis in a wealth of illustrative detail. Nobody in Corsica had ever had a monopoly of violence; and the French authorities who tried to establish one in the century after the island ...”

“... valueless as a psychological document, and not much less so as a factual one. Elizabeth Wilson knows all this as well as anyone. In her own preface to the original 1994 edition of her documentary biography Shostakovich: A Life Remembered she noted that at the end of the 1980s, when she was conducting her researches, glasnost was enabling Russians ...”

“... by the Allies, on the charge of being the criminal mainly responsible for the War’. Woodrow Wilson, informed of the decision as he embarked for France on 3 December, refused to commit the US to anything until he reached Paris. But although by the spring of 1920 it had become evident that neither an international trial in absentia nor a trial in Holland ...”

“... on the Western Front. Over naval affairs the exchanges of heavy fire between Arthur Marder and Stephen Roskill reduced all others to awe-struck silence. On domestic politics Lord Beaverbrook and his acolyte A.J.P. Taylor gave us plenty to be going on with, even before younger specialists like Cameron Hazlehurst began to dissect the minutiae of Cabinet ...”

“... carry conviction. It’s William Boyd’s strongest performance so far. The narrator of A.N. Wilson’s The Bottle in the Smoke is also engaged in retrospect and revaluation, as any hero of a roman fleuve is likely to be. It’s the second novel in a sequence begun with Incline our hearts (1988), which took us through the orphaned Julian Ramsay’s early ...”

“... for the benefit of the art trade. The best part of Lacey’s book is the portrait of Peter Cecil Wilson, third son of Sir Mathew ‘Scatters’ Wilson, Bart. PCW became a porter in the furniture department at Sotheby’s in 1936, was allowed to catalogue and market an important sale of antique rings the following year, and ...”

“... He is living in Wiltshire within a stone’s throw of a large house in which a scarcely-disguised Stephen Tennant is, like England, gathering dust and going to seed. Nothing happens in the book, yet the writing is hypnotic. Naipaul has always had a mage-like quality, weaving a mystique both about himself and about the craft of writing. Theroux by contrast is ...”

“... without a natural break.But in December 1973 he attended another all-night performance, of Robert Wilson’s Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, and met Wilson at the post-performance party as dawn broke over Manhattan. Wilson was not so much a playwright as what has been called a theatre ...”

“... is the last thing he proposed to himself in his Bloemfontein adolescence, reading Joyce and taking Stephen Daedalus’s intention to fly by the nets of nationality, language and religion as a guide. He is too ambitious to be content with becoming a second-rate writer (which is what the poems included tactfully indicate), and settles for a Civil Service career ...”

“... prepared to make a declaration of incompatibility; but the remaining three (Neuberger, Mance and Wilson), forming a majority within the majority, held that any declaration of incompatibility should be deferred for long enough to give Parliament a chance to get its legislation into conformity with the Convention, failing which the court would intervene. The ...”

“... Intelligence Service had penetrated British life. The MI5 officer quickly dispensed with the Wilson Government – its penetration was taken as read – slandered Wilson’s own loyalties and those of several members of his Cabinet, and then moved on to the Royal family. The thrust of his accusations was that ...”

“... components of Britishness that is the fundamental cause of the monarchy’s current malaise. Stephen Haseler, author of one of the most intelligent of the 1993 vintage of royal books, is absolutely right that ‘the magnitude of the appropriation by the monarchy of the symbols of nationhood and authority is breathtaking.’ Her Majesty’s Government ...”