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“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they were, hampered by a literary education and training in ‘conventional strategies of expression’. A similar point is made about the ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... Libyan adventure of 1912, an essay which combines patriotic fervour with a deep intelligence and self-questioning. Like so many others he died and disappeared, his work now virtually unknown except to a few fellow bibliophiles: had he lived, he would probably have disappeared in any case into middle-aged obscurity, the state of resignation which, as he found ...”

“... on whom he experimented for meagre payments). In fact, the myth of Hunter’s self-inoculation was scotched by George Quist in a 1979 paper. The story, designed to fit the image of the inhuman experimentalist, was fabricated by a pupil of Hunter’s, Jesse Foot, who had become a disgruntled rival. One of Hunter’s biographers wants to ...”

“... British politics, is in reality ‘another chapter of decline and fall, accompanied by ever wilder self-deceptions which are really compensations for a certain inescapable and shameful weakness of state’. Donald Dewar finds Nairn’s antithetical habit of mind infuriating (as in ‘Youthism is not a bad term for the resultant terminal condition: a strategy ...”

“... Cuvier – manoeuvred for mastery. In this world – to which our most trustworthy guide is not Robert Merton but Sir Lewis Namier or the Stendhal who understood Julien Sorel – Cuvier did indeed become the great place-man, dispensing a loaf here to nephew Charles and some fishes – mainly fossil ones – to brother Frédéric. And he did so because he ...”

“... of what the same speaker calls ‘this world-cataclysmic drama’. As for the second passage, how self-important would you have to be (at 15) to ‘become conscious of an oscillation of temperament’, or ‘appreciate a countervailing vision of tolerant scepticism’? Surely neither life nor Sheila Rowbotham is like that. But the sense of whatever authentic ...”

“... to admit that they probably irradiated some innocent bystanders. The United States Government self-righteously fights any liability tooth and claw in the courts. The British Government hides behind an Act of Parliament which was never intended to assist in avoiding culpability. On 3 October 1952, the British Government, anxious to retain its role as a ...”

“... appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met. I never quite found my way there, but ...”

“... but this is almost certainly not the case. It was rather that he seemed to lack any kind of self-doubt or self-criticism. How else could he claim, in his interpretation of the Sistine Ceiling, that Julius II’s ‘favourite theologian’ was a man whom the Pope may never have met, and whose work he may never have ...”

“... of Eden belonged to the tragedy of the peasantry in the 19th century. The family farm in Wyre was self-sufficient, they ate bannocks, butter, cheese and milk made by themselves from their own fields and their own animals, they sent the wool from their own sheep to a Border town to be made up into clothes, and they ate so much crab and lobster from the sea ...”

“... in the Fifties. But today, more than 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred Step’ (a combination of five steps which he credited to Pavlova). It ...”

“... the predominant buyer in the market, capable of dictating the terms of trade. This success led Robert Thorpe, the former chief justice of the colony, to launch a scathing attack on the company in the London press. By dominating trade in Sierra Leone, he argued, wasn’t Macaulay & Babington acting as a domineering economic agent of the sort that Smith and ...”

“... this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with it – but they ...”