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“... susceptibility. Such fusions of impulse and diagnosis are the hallmark of Lewis’s writing at its best. They also got him into a lot of trouble. Paul O’Keeffe’s new Life of Lewis does not hold back on the toe-jam. Some Sort of Genius is, among other things, a compendium of the many reasons people found to dislike its subject. Lewis became, sometimes by ...”

“... the mainly black servants once lived. The town has its own architectural hero, an Irishman called Nicholas Clayton, who designed a number of vigorous polychrome brick buildings in a medley of late Victorian styles. Ellen is deeply attuned to her subject, and has a particular appreciation of the simple geometry of the more modest houses, which have their own ...”

“... with an admiring and affectionate account of the city, the only part of the poem allowed by Tsar Nicholas I to be published in Pushkin’s lifetime. But a hint of menace is present in the opening lines: On a shore washed by the desolate waves, he stood, Full of high thoughts, and gazed into the distance. The monumental anonymous ‘he’ suggests both ...”

“... by the depressive’. A similar loss of identity occurred when he visited Paris with the artist Nicholas Garland, and again in Segovia. Barbara, his future wife of six decades, had stayed at home. Meanwhile, he was working like a pit-horse. ‘My life,’ he writes, ‘was filled with activities that, separately, would have lasted anyone else a ...”

“... the royal couple concentrated on minimising their exposure to political risk. Ridley does her best to show that George wasn’t just a ‘cipher sovereign’. At critical junctures, he could insist on his understanding of constitutional norms, and was encouraged by his secretary Arthur Bigge to think of himself as a neutral facilitator of consensus. He ...”

“... among his menaces of damnation’. Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape in the godly ...”

“... friend. He has never completely kicked the Grub/Fleet Street habit and is probably best known to American audiences for his essays on literary and other topics in upmarket periodicals. In the UK, and to some extent in Australia, however, his name evokes fame of a larger kind, and is strongly linked to television. Between 1972 and 1982, his TV ...”

“... was turning into something of an industry, with an indiscriminate appetite for fact and rumour. Nicholas Rowe’s life, appended to his 1709 edition of the plays, was based partly on information gleaned by the actor Thomas Betterton from descendants of people who might have gossiped or drunk with Shakespeare. Rowe established many of the paradigms for later ...”

“... in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an outsider, courteous yet aloof and observant. The son of a Lichfield sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and ...”

“... remained firmly committed to the Westernisation that had created it. Even during the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) – an arch-counterrevolutionary – the embrace of narodnost (sometimes translated as ‘nationality’ but meaning something like ‘being of the people’) remained relatively superficial. It was the Slavophiles, a group of Herder-inspired ...”

“... as Austen herself did, when we know that the effect on other people is most often negligible at best and at worst deleterious, has never gone away. The correct answer today is that we dress for ourselves, but that isn’t quite true either. We dress to say something about ourselves and the question is: to whom are the remarks addressed? They can be, indeed ...”

“... some of this quality from its being made so by its participants, who were, after all, some of the best writers of the period. It may not be easy to gauge the documents of an age that invented such brilliant documentaries, and whose novelists pretended to be a Camera.Take one of Carpenter’s best stories, Auden’s marriage ...”

“... only talking about myself. In any case, with the whole topic so charged and so difficult, it is best to begin with the agreed facts. The climate of our planet is not stable. The whole of recorded human history has taken place within what is, from the earth’s point of view, a relatively narrow band of temperature. From a glaciological perspective, we are ...”

“... Portraits afford many opportunities for the exercise of this kind of discretion, since they are best regarded not as simple reproductions of objects in the painter’s visual field but rather as presentations (as well as representations) of the sitter to the spectator: in other words, as documents of what the late Erving Goffman used to call ‘impression ...”

“... Barnes (b. 1946), although nothing from Shuttlecock, by Graham Swift (b. 1949), which gives the best description I know of the territory, real and psychological, in which his generation grew up in Britain: What attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls ... [than] the relics of the war that still ...”