“... All Oxford and Cambridge colleges, many ‘redbrick’ universities and most of the celebrated North American universities began with private endowments. Many of our professorships, laboratories and libraries owe a similar debt to private benefaction. There is nothing new in a diversity of sources for a university’s central fund. It is certainly not an ...”

“... instance, with Lewis and Clark. Coleridge himself stipulated that a poet must have ‘the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an Enemy upon the Leaves that strew the forest’. Then there is a very personal judgment of Holmes’s, tucked away in a note: ‘Coleridge’s version of the emigration scheme has, at times, almost a Science ...”

“... away on the ship that was taking her home; was discovered, court-martialled and banished to the North-West Frontier. She was staying with her parents in the country when she heard his death announced on the Six O’clock News. Back in London, she finds a last letter from him, which she quotes – and that’s the end of him, he isn’t mentioned again. It ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... more right-wing than is generally thought’. His hero is America’s Greatest Liar, Oliver North. He engages in constant ‘telephone terrorism’ against his editors, reducing supposedly hard men like Kelvin MacKenzie and David Montgomery to stammering wrecks and causing Patsy Chapman, the editor of the News of the World, to suffer a nervous ...”

“... this complex web of interests and arriving at a settlement will not be easy. According to John Stockwell, who ran the CIA’s covert programme in Angola during the Seventies, it was the Agency which laid the first stone in what is now an edifice of superpower rivalry. In Stockwell’s account, the Americans began funding the FNLA, one of three ...”

“... Modernism and non-Western image-making, to create subtle, layered masterpieces. On Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, ‘Fairweather had set himself up off the main road,’ Bail writes, ‘a mile or two from the shops and post office. A bushfire had swallowed his tent and all of his belongings ... if he painted at night it would be with the erratic assistance ...”

“... and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every physicist ‘from the North Sea to the southern tip of Italy’. It was from a clerk’s post in the Bern patent office that the 26-year-old, still without a doctorate, wrote the four papers that transformed our understanding of the physical universe. Yet they were also very different ...”

“... nose as a souvenir. It happens that I have written a play about Caracalla’s behaviour in North Britain, so I decided that if I was forced to read verse, I would declaim to the Arabs a song from my play in which Caracalla praises Alexander. Near the ancient arch is a modern monument, a ‘panorama’ set in a high tower, looking like a ...”

“... with the street-poetry of dialect words – yagach, faffing – and the shared pavements of the North. His special tone arises, I think, from his sense of gallantry which makes an accepted claim upon him but which the conditions of his life haven’t allowed him to sustain for long. This sense of unaffordable values appears in the poems from time to time as ...”

“... these folk were Europeans. One wouldn’t want to see them come to harm. Stansted’s a long way north of New Orleans. But dash it all, eh what! What a kerfuffle Just to sort out some minor tribal scuffle! It seems these hijack chappies hate Nyerere And think that Stansted’s the best place to say it. The SAS are on tap looking scarey, A mighty strong ...”

“... hard to get the Church’s permission to enter. Trinity wanted to maintain its connection with the North, since it meant a connection to Britain. And they made a particular virtue out of the circumstance that a fairly large number of foreign students, for whatever reason, came to Dublin. When I taught at University College, I felt some resentment toward ...”

“... Brigade. In recent years there has been a conservative revival, apparent in the reappearance of John Buchan on the shelves, or the clean-cut manly values of Chariots of Fire. Churchill is modish again, and all the more so after the Falklands. Those who followed Southern Television’s series about the Churchill of the 1930s will recognise the extent to ...”

“... a creaking gate; it always has fairly serious crises without them being terminal.’ He points to North Sea oil as the kind of unanticipated stroke of fortune that has again and again come to England’s aid. John Bull had his drawbacks as a national symbol, but surely Mr Micawber is no improvement. ‘We inhabit as golden ...”

“... compensates for any parsimony in the archival evidence available to him. For example, in 1945 Sir John Colville recorded in his diary, since published and now firmly in the public domain: ‘I don’t like the would-be ingratiating way in which Macmillan bares his teeth.’ Davenport-Hines digresses at some length, starting from the observation that ...”