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“... Gothic texts, some sort of metempsychosis or rebirth. Both of these men are disturbed or mad. Nicholas Dyer is imagined as the builder of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches in the East End of London: the enlightened edifices of a rational Christianity are thereby ascribed to a devil-worshipper, while the name ...”

“... adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the point. Number two in my list of all-time favourites ...”

“... freelance agent. Since diplomatic cover was not an option, his schoolfriend and fellow MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott got him a job as a stringer for the Observer and the Economist. Beirut made good sense as a posting: his father, St John Philby, a well-known Arabist, was living there at the time, and the Middle East was an area of growing interest to British ...”

“... Wordsworth come from? Where did he get that sublime sense of something indescribable but urgent? Nicholas Roe’s Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years first appeared thirty years ago – too late to help me with my A-Level essay. The new introduction to the second edition contains a persuasive reading of ‘Tintern Abbey’ as a ...”

“... the quick genius of his creativity, its speedy sublime. (He would write a one-act play, one of his best works, about Mozart and Salieri, in which Salieri, maddened by Mozart’s genius and ‘idle wantonness’, poisons him. One of the four so-called Little Tragedies, it is too brief to have been often staged, and is difficult to find in English. Besides, it ...”

“... was good enough for Büchner, in his play Woyzeck, it should be good enough for us. Like the best of recent historians of psychiatry, Herdman starts in his book with some reflections on Christian accounts of madness, and how Christianity sees Reason and Unreason as doubles, and how many early Christians were themselves seen as mad. In the writings of St ...”

“... is, God alone knows. I couldn’t trace it in Lloyd’s Register, but it may have been renamed. At best, ships live half as long as humans, and it would now be 38 years old. I was at its launch in October 1956: the photo shows me in school cap and muffler, with Great-Uncle Alex and Great-Aunt Jean, Cousin Jean, two small Canadian girls, their father and their ...”

“... setting of a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell, unconnected with the famous river) is almost its best-known feature. But jazz idioms crop up all over the place, sometimes as no more than crisp, syncopated rhythms, sometimes as harmonic suggestions. Now and then the music gets bogged down in figurings of this kind; at least as often it is energised by ...”

“... This year Germany’s growth rate is set to be 4.5 per cent. Britain’s will be 1 per cent. Nicholas Ridley’s embarrassing outburst about the German threat has only served to underline that there is now no doubt which is the model, and which the retard. The fizzling-out of the Thatcher ‘miracle’ is a good time to reflect on the conditions of ...”

“... history – as well as the longest entry in Britain’s Who’s Who. Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, Prince of Battenberg, was born on 25 June 1900, the second son of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria. His father, grandson of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt and son of Prince Alexander of Battenberg, had joined the British Navy in ...”

“... first danger. The second danger, they protest, does not exist. Or rather, if it does exist, it is best not to mention it. Security service bosses, they tell us, have been agents of the enemy. The first difficulty here is that enemies change. From 1940 to 1945, for instance, the enemy was Germany, Italy and (to a slightly lesser degree) Fascism. Russia ...”

“... republics. Where nationalist trends were already evident, as in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks did their best to embed them in the Soviet (as opposed to a ‘bourgeois’) framework provided in this case by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Where they were more or less absent, as in Belorussia, a republican territory was allocated anyway and efforts were made ...”

“... But politicians weren’t blameless. ‘All prime ministers love intelligence,’ the diplomat Nicholas Henderson claimed: it allows them to believe that they have a ‘direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have’. At the beginning it all looked innocent enough. GCHQ grew out of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley ...”

“... bastards, and that both their contempt for the world and St Aubyn’s contempt for them find their best expression in a certain kind of intelligent, frozen stylishness. His upper-class snobs, perverts, tyrants, addicts and solipsists speak aphoristically, amusingly, cleverly, disdainfully; and the high polish of St Aubyn’s own prose is almost ...”

“... of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning monasteries constantly do their best to reform themselves, because monastic life is always prone to lapse into unheroic comfort and modified austerity. A more radical critique emerged at the end of the 12th century, with a great proliferation of new and distinctive communities called ...”