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“... On the other hand, the most profoundly conservative British historian in this century, Sir Lewis Namier, cordially detested Burke and found his ideological claims a distorting distraction and delusion in the important business of political classification and observation of manoeuvre. The point is of consequence because in comparison with the ...”

“... heart was in it. In his entertaining colonial service autobiography A Mole in the Crown, Michael Carritt describes working under Anderson when he became Governor of Bengal in the mid-1930s. He had been sent to Bengal as a strongman, a trouble-shooter, to cope with a quick succession of terrorist assassinations and an increase in Indian nationalist ...”

“... of Shakespeare prompts a reference to Plato, followed by John Stuart Mill, with George Orwell and Lewis Carroll bringing up the rear. Then come ten sections on the naming of birds, the ninth dealing with those named after people. He mentions my favourite of these, the ground-dwelling forest cisticola with a rufous face, throat and breast called Mrs Moreau’s ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”

“... reclaim the African and Asian colonies lost after the Great War, he was silenced by the historian Lewis Namier with the words: ‘Wir Juden und die anderen Farbigen denken anders.’ Some Zionists tried to persuade themselves that they counted among Namier’s ‘other coloured peoples’, or even that Zionism was an anti-colonial movement. The indefatigable ...”

“... shared a building with National Lampoon. Kincaid struck up a conversation with one of its writers, Michael O’Donoghue, who suggested she meet his friend George Trow, a staff writer at the New Yorker. Trow organised a lunch with Kincaid and William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, at the Algonquin. Kincaid ordered the most expensive item on the menu ...”

“... seven months at the Press Lehmann made his first appearance as an editor when he commissioned Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met ...”

“... The third finds Seven in his corrupt middle age, rich and nasty: the epigraph is from Lewis Mumford – about the vomitorium used by Roman gluttons, a room in which to be sick, during banquets, before stuffing themselves some more. The boom that made Seven fat was purely monetary, involving no labour, no honest earning. He travelled from England ...”

“... who knew the difference between right and wrong. Not even that Duke of Newcastle described by Sir Lewis Namier had more patronage at his disposal than Mrs Thatcher has enjoyed: and Sir Robert Walpole and his successors were vulnerable to visits from grandees, who called on him with the word that it was time for a change. As a friend of mine, a Conservative ...”

“... 20 grand a year seems to be the favoured target. Beryl Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections ...”

“... that humanity was getting a handle on the weather. While the meteorologist and mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was serving as an ambulance driver on the Western Front, he found time to work out a way of going back to the fundamentals of weather, the physics and maths of it. His first attempt to apply these principles produced a completely inaccurate ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... and functions on their own. His world is in a sense that of Hardy, Milne’s like that of C.S. Lewis or Tolkien. Milne’s ideology was not theirs, but all three have the ideologue’s intrusiveness: like Owl and Rabbit they are fundamentally bossy. Part of Milne’s cleverness, of course, is to make himself, and ourselves, and Christopher Robin and Pooh ...”

“... That book also caused a furore in North America. It had its supporters – among them, Anthony Lewis in the New York Times and Leon Wieseltier in Dissent (Wieseltier has written a rather different review of The Longest War in Harper’s). But, because Timerman rails against fascists of the right as well as those on the left, it had the misfortune to run ...”

“... scholars who deny that what took place was a genocide as legally defined include Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, David Fromkin, Justin McCarthy, Guenther Lewy, Norman Stone, Michael Gunter, Andrew Mango, Roderic Davison, Edward Erickson and Steven Katz, and although all of them have had dealings with Turkish academic ...”