“... won’t expect British soldiers to act as beaters for their driven grouse shooting, as Prince William did at Balmoral in 2016. Even so, Taymouth shows again that the fundamentals of land ownership and control have been only minimally affected by land reform.Taymouth Castle is a proto-Balmoral that foreshadowed in taste and sensibility the version of ...”

“... didn’t concern him. But before he wrote the poem he wrote an essay, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, set out as an argument between a public prosecutor and a counsel for the defence, in which the value of poetry is itself interrogated.The prosecutor makes little of Yeats’s engagement in ‘Easter 1916’: ‘After the rebellion of ...”

“... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...”

“... There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist. The olive-coloured Avon ripples ...”

“... This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ideology: technocratic triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, libertarian survivalist bullshit. Hard SF fuelled both the Cold War space race and Ronald ...”

“... have a former Arab population.’ Zionist propaganda about Arab refugees, said the Jewish writer William Zuckerman in 1958, ‘has literally succeeded in changing black into white, lies into truth and serious social injustice into an act of justice, praised by thousands.’ Evidently, the process continues.Apart from Arabs ...”

“... man’, of ‘Through the Night’, the first section of which ends: ‘The pale green leaf clings white to the lit night/and shakes a little on its stiff, tense twig’ (where only the word ‘little’ is not a monosyllable). I find him browsing along the seam of self and world, like a painter, or like a European poet, not unlike Montale or Pasternak, the ...”

“... and cannot even advance a weaker claim to connoisseurship because my favourite English Iliad is William Wyatt’s 1999 updating of his great-uncle A.T. Murray’s 1924 version, because of the Greek text on its facing pages, because of the handy Loeb format well suited to air travel (and to cheap replacement when left aboard), and for its literal yet stylish ...”

“... her character’s name from the Silkies of Northumberland: female spirits ‘dressed in rustling white silk’. They were known for helping around the house, like the generally male and better-known Brownies, a species, Briggs says, of ‘household hobgoblins’: ‘little rough, hairy men who are to be found all over the Lowlands of Scotland, the North and ...”

“... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...”

“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... that becomes central to the story’s final act. Arturo’s island, with its ‘beaches of fine white sand, and smaller beaches covered with pebbles and shells, hidden between great cliffs that overhang the water’, becomes a rock theatre that encloses and amplifies the struggle between Arturo and his father – theatre itself, presumably, has its origin ...”

“... bibliographers, theatre-historians, Marxists, historicists new and old. Some wretched ‘white British Shakespearean scholar’, scourged in half a paragraph for a lifetime’s imperception, is well on his chastened way back to the sulphurous and tormenting flames before I realise that he bears my own name. This is Bardbiz, nor are we out of ...”

“... the medical reformer and Julian Huxley the socially-conscious scientist helped to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country ...”

“... the mistake of appearing to be America’s surrogate in Europe; he, at least, never fawned on the White House. Heath is the nearest thing This Blessed Plot has to a politician-hero; apart from Roy Jenkins the other heroes are the usually unsung civil servants: Lee, O’Neill, Robinson, Butler, Palliser etc, who shepherded us into the Community with a skill ...”