“... bout of Scotophobia without parallel since the violently anti-Scottish mood of the English mob in Lord Bute’s day. The ignorance and nastiness of some of this journalism have been startling. The Daily Telegraph wrote that Scotland was ‘trapped in the squalor of dependency’. ‘Until recently,’ the paper asserted, ‘an English voter hearing Gordon ...”

“... to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out Trevor-Roper’s assessment of Bedford’s ...”

“... case. It appealed to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was Thomas Cromwell, who in early 1519 went to Rome to make his client’s case at the pope’s court. He journeyed via ...”

“... Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner at the firm until last month, when Starmer appointed her to the Lords and made her an education minister.At the party conference last year, Starmer told a ‘business forum’ of more than two hundred ...”

“... must have then felt like her oversize presence in literary life. From her late teens she made a home of the Mandrake Club and Caves de France in Soho; she argued at the soirées held by the literary journalist and Romanian émigré Miron Grindea. In every interview – there were several – she bemoaned the ‘dry’, ‘academic’ consciousness of her ...”

“... Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the start of the war might have fetched him home still on the same tack, 1st September 1939 finding him not in a dive on 52nd Street but in some bleak provincial drill hall having those famous bunyons vetted for service in the Intelligence Corps. Auden might (and some say should) have condemned himself to ...”

“... in his Life of Charlemagne written between 814 and 817, who ‘took care of everything, either at home or abroad, that needed to be done and arranged for the administration of the kingdom’. Kings should be able to wield power effectively. The chronicler Regino of Prüm, writing between 900 and 908, commented on the crisis after the Emperor Charles the ...”

“... pumped out ‘detailed truth with believable lies’, and was intended (like the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw from the other side) to rot enemy morale. She was there for less than six months, but it sensitised her to the fine line between fiction, conspiracy and falsehood which she treads so expertly in many of her novels. Her allegory of Watergate set in a ...”

“... of madness on this side of the Channel remained ad hoc and un-systematic, with most madmen kept at home or left to roam the countryside, while that small fraction who were confined could generally be found in the small ‘madhouses’ which made up the newly-emerging private ‘trade in lunacy’. There was no English ‘exorcism’ of madness; no serious ...”

“... one day, perhaps, you will notice that the house you are defending is empty and nobody has been at home for years. Meanwhile you are here in the half-dark with the patriote isolé. ‘Millions of French people were brought up in the worship of Robespierre,’ says François Crouzet in an essay here. How is it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of ...”

“... coherence’, then suddenly cut, so that ‘they rolled to all the corners of the room.’ ‘Good Lord,’ she prayed, ‘give me a personality.’ One of the most extraordinary things about the Benson family is that Minnie too had seen Edward White Benson through a child’s eyes: they had become engaged when she was 12. After his death she began to reassess ...”

“... Cather never doubts that we can perceive the splendour as she depicts it. They are letters home, like the letters to Philomène. One is in the land, the other in the domestic sphere; the free eagle to the nest, the home to the world. Letters from William to Willa, and back.If it is all substance, running in its ...”

“... is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps chopping and changing long after they have gone home. She didn’t outsmart or outperform her enemies. She outstayed them. A lot has been made of her ability to function on four hours’ sleep a night. Moore indicates that this is something of a myth. No, she didn’t sleep much, but often this made her tetchy ...”

“... city are more likely to be found notorious in the country.We made a trip into Glasgow to a care home on the Crow Road, where Edwin Morgan was then living and writing. He and I had corresponded when he left his old flat and lost his library. I sent him some books and we agreed to see each other in Glasgow. Eddie was a city man. He was a city poet. It must ...”

“... they’d taken the island from the Dutch in the Napoleonic wars, found there was only one local lord left to deal with. King Vikrama Rajasinha believed he could hold the city of Kandy, which is situated in the jungle of the central highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British ...”