“... could be formed other than of particular folks. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs brings home the way in which tradition and the individual talent can converge in that astonishing thing, a well-nigh instant authentic tradition. ‘It is a reflection of the proverb’s vitality that new ones are continually being created’; on the other hand (a ...”

“... has ever made Who’s Who in Australia, though family legend has it that my great grandfather was Lord Mayor of Brisbane for a time in the 1880s ... I have to dress up my material: it is very ordinary stuff.’ This is modest and charming. It will also serve as an introduction to Peter Porter’s primary subject-matter. He is richly intrigued and preoccupied ...”

“... of Canada have an embossed red crown on his official stationery? When Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, George successfully dissuaded him from calling a ship HMS Pitt, because the name was ‘neither euphonious nor dignified’, and the men might invent ‘nicknames of illconditioned words rhyming with it’. And opulence and privilege only ...”

“... companion Ross from the party scene in Paris. Taking up an offer to visit them at their country home, Gault House, Carston soon contemplates a romantic fling with Scylla, only to be humiliated when she decides in favour of Picus, a friend and neighbour who until now has been living with his lover Clarence. Carston feels cruelly deceived, while ...”

“... sexual excitement of the relationship between Oliver Alden and his father’s ship captain, Lord Jim: a relationship which moves through the range of feeling from sexual captivation through the disappointments of an unacknowledged and unconsummated love affair to an ambivalent, sentimental friendship of the kind Santayana himself had with the second ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... might be nearer the mark.Meanwhile, Johnson shows a keen interest in shoring up his power at home. The Tory manifesto contained a commitment to repeal the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. The Act is said to be widely unpopular, and at the last election the Labour Party also promised to do away with it. But do we really want to go back to the old days of 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 ...”