“... influence and that Britain’s real mistake was to get involved in a war to stop her. It was Sir Edward Grey’s determination to do so that turned what might otherwise have been a short European war into a protracted world war. This, Ferguson writes, was ‘worse than a tragedy’: it was ‘nothing less than the greatest error of modern history’. There ...”

“... Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked the show. Later in life, Codron became more ...”

“... of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that you ...”

“... some engaging pictures of potentates, not all trustworthy-looking. But do we need a portrait of Edward VII just because he sat on the platform at a Curzon lecture? The Ladies of Castlebrae is a saga of learned frumps triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St ...”

“... even from men – at moments of political rupture and calamity, or in the face of suffering: Sir Edward Coke, a Jacobean judge, ‘never pronounced a sentence of death without weeping’. The Quaker refusal to remove or doff hats as a sign of respect provoked intense opposition – though formal greetings could also be used in an uncivil manner. Thomas notes ...”

“... Without Wallace and Bruce, so Victorian Scots argued, Scotland would have been conquered by Edward I and incorporated as a vassal people within a Plantagenet despotism. Instead, late medieval Scots had preserved their independence, allowing their fortunate successors to join in union with England in 1707 as equal partners in the British ...”

“... just completed its monument. Most haunting of all, near Bloemfontein, were ‘countless mounds of brown earth, some of them only two or three feet in length’, which covered the remains of Boer women and children, some 26,000 in all, who perished in the nearby concentration camp. In Pretoria Haggard called in at the cemetery where Oom Paul (Kruger) was ...”

“... to family. Being Scottish also meant he could write about the countryside without sounding like Edward Thomas. His landscapes are almost always damp, brown and unkempt. The Bankscape is not the South of England. Ten, and finally, he was immensely likeable. One of the many endearing aspects of Raw Spirit – which amounts ...”

“... a few birds before getting shooed off by rangers. On their way back to the umiak they disturbed a brown bear, which rose up on its hind legs, roared and chased them to the boat. Back in Gloucestershire, Bob and Brian came upon an escaped panther in the woods and had to slink cautiously away. The natural order is big animals eating smaller ones, which is the ...”

“... century, arguments against higher education for women were awash with scientific misinformation: Edward Clarke, author of the bestselling Sex in Education, or A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), was well in line with mainstream science when he claimed that ‘the rigours of study during the menstrual period would destroy a woman’s reproductive ...”

“... suggests that Selous, an old Rugbcian, deliberately created an authorial personality to recall Tom Brown: ‘honest, modest, brave, and enlivened’ by an innocent love of mischief. She drily adds: ‘Of his modesty, it may be said that though everyone remarked on his reluctance to talk about himself, it is not recorded that anyone ever failed to get him to do ...”

“... is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors ...”

“... the language of “diversity”’. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a group created by Edward Blum, a conservative lawyer dedicated to eradicating positive racial discrimination, sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, alleging that, in their zeal to increase their intake of Black and Latino students, the schools had discriminated ...”

“... the staff lunch that allowed him to behave as ‘an encyclopedic egoist’, in his colleague Ivor Brown’s phrase, who drank large brandies and smoked big cigars and entertained a loyal audience that included the proprietor, the courtly Waldorf, and writers such as C.A. Lejeune, hired as film critic from the Manchester Guardian, and Joyce Grenfell, who as ...”

“... sightline of two passing nuns. But it’s all quite gloomy and solitary, as if she’s stuck in an Edward Hopper painting. The effect of reading about the lady is strange; you’re struck by the poignancy of your own mundane rituals, as if, all of a sudden, you were drunk. Brennan wanted to write ‘as though the camera had never been invented’. She’s a ...”