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“... arguments seemed much more exciting, and I devoured everything he wrote. Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw have made an excellent selection from his writings, filling two large volumes, and contribute well-informed and perceptive commentaries. Ploughing one’s way through the later pieces is a dispiriting experience, however. The polemics were ...”

“... account of her own life in writing, tracing a history for her imagination. Munro follows her Laidlaw family history back to the Ettrick Valley, fifty miles south of Edinburgh and thirty miles north of the English border, which her great-great-great-grandfather James and his family left in 1818. Much painstaking ...”

“... me after that because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints ...”

“... On a winter’s evening in 1803, James Hogg turned up for dinner at the home of Walter Scott. The man his host liked to call ‘the honest grunter’ was shown into the drawing-room, where a pregnant Mrs Scott was resting on a sofa. Unsure of the protocol in these toney surroundings, and deciding to take his cue from the hostess, Hogg flopped onto an adjoining sofa, smirching the chintz with his dung-spattered boots ...”

“... and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A.K. Laidlaw’. We tend to think of the subject of this biography as the greatest voice of modern Scottish literature; more accurately, he is the greatest chorus. Born in 1892 in the Scottish Border mill-town of Langholm, Grieve, even before adopting the name Hugh ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”