“... a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to mention Lord Balogh, the Balliol don Harold Wilson recruited as an economic adviser in 1964, without telling us what it was like to be an inter-war Hungarian radical under ‘a sclerotic, semi-fascist regime, brooding over its Habsburg past’, or to talk about Norway ...”

“... routinely appeared in American business jokes of the period. Jews were meant to be at home in commerce; Eliot’s “Bleistein” is not.’ The image of Bleistein’s gold teeth in ‘Dirge’ picks up the fondness Jews were supposed to have for that commodity. Bleistein is a commercial failure, however, who lacks even a pauper’s grave – a ...”

“... reference to Palestine as ‘a land without people for people without a land’ – an echo of Lord Shaftesbury’s romantic formulation forty years before. Europe’s Jews, Hezl urged, should fill that providential void. To the surprise of the first Zionist emissaries, Palestine was already inhabited. Herzl’s attempt to solve what he and Europe’s ...”

“... rest of his life. The narrative of the walk concludes with the entry for 24 July 1841: Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – ‘and how can I forget Quotation marks opened but never closed. The forlorn plea is ambiguous, both question and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”