“... who has what I’d call an unusually good memory for apparel, possessed that keen sense of self-preservation that the more emotional ‘Dick’ Hannay lacked. ‘I certainly didn’t address him the way I had at other times, as Mr Hoover.’ I should just about think not. A year later, Mrs Rosenstiel, still a martyr to her hubby’s specialised ...”

“... mid-life reaction-to-the-reactionary. After all, the world has seen such things before; remember Robert Frost’s ‘I never dared be radical when young/For fear it would make me conservative when old.’ In fact, however, it is nothing of the sort. Norris is a passionately engaged radical critic of the Anglo-American Establishment. It is precisely because ...”

“... and its unique freshness. Wilson, it should be said, is always making judgments: scepticism and self-irony are not part of his repertoire. He did write poems, plays and novels, but they have always seemed to me neither as interesting nor as satisfying as his essays and historical studies. His own imagination simply does not soar, nor his insight pierce ...”

“... precious to uncork. McGann turns the tables on the common judgment that Morris’s books were too self-conscious to be readable (‘beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti stone’ in the punning words of Robert Carlton Brown, a maker of what on the evidence of McGann’s examples must be handmade ...”

“... of denying the immortality of the soul, for example, that sounds less than totally ingenuous. Robert Fogelin, who has written extensively on Wittgenstein and more recently on Hume, is mainly concerned in his latest book to correct an imbalance in Hume interpretation.* In the earlier part of this century a common view was that Hume’s main achievement was ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... a touch over his pupils’ heads, hoping his allusions will be ‘looked up’ and encourage self-improvement. A teacher may use this technique: but a novelist, supposedly talking with equals, may offend his readers and spoil his plain story, as Aldous Huxley did, making us feel he is patronising us, showing off. Burgess knows his pupils’ reluctance to ...”

“... emperor Menelik II and his queen Taytu Betul, who thanks to their good looks and skill at self-promotion were already familiar figures on the world stage. Diplomats, arms dealers, journalists and the plain curious from Europe and the US hurried to ingratiate themselves with the victors in the hope of securing lucrative contracts. Westerners sought to ...”

“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”

“... coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris ...”

“... European Parliament. The lessons that Macron drew from his 2017 campaign seemed, as the historian Robert Zaretzky wrote, to be the ‘wrong ones’ for 2019. Part of the reason is technical. Unlike the majority system in national elections in France, the European Parliament is elected by proportional representation, which does not produce a single ...”

“... and it is hard to see what Unionists could have done except resist Home Rule, not merely from self-interest, but from a purist belief that Home Rule was a corrupt bargain extracted from an already decadent imperial power. There are comparisons to be made here with the Boers in the 1890s and the public posture of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. No wonder ...”

“... of which the axioms were known, not through experiments, but through intuition, revelation and self-evidence. This kind of pure scientist felt one-up on a man who dissected dead animals – a snobbism which has lasted more than 300 years. He quotes Thomas Pratt, one of the founders of the Royal Society, writing in 1667: ‘The first thing that ought to be ...”

“... incapable of acting except foolishly, except when the occasion doesn’t require it, because he is self-bewilderingly odd. There is a character who claims to have no father, only a grandfather, and when that is called an odd omission, cannot see why: he is a type of all Gerhardie’s sympathetic characters, and nearly all of them are sympathetic. The ...”

“... family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected ...”