“... the employee of a private trading company. Yet, just as Newport was ultimately acting on behalf of James I, so Cortés’s expedition had been made possible by private Spanish financiers. The ‘king’ Powhatan was clearly no Montezuma, and Newport’s attempt to crown him (with a copper crown) ended in farce. His ‘empire’ was no empire, and contained ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... in more ways than one. The atmosphere was liberal and he made life-long friends there, including Simon Bussy and Albert Marquet. Matisse the art student was rowdier and unrulier than his later respectability would suggest (‘Oh do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, that I ...”

“... themselves within a political heritage usually misrepresent their forbears: the Spenserians of James I’s reign, and Milton after them, re-cast Spenser in their own image. The process Norbrook describes, of adaptation within continuity, runs parallel to, and seems largely to have been created by, the tradition which has been located by ...”

“... connections, which ranged from Rodin to Mrs Humphry Ward, put the eminent on their mettle. Henry James thought her school at ‘high, breezy Wimbledon’ held ‘a very particular place ... The one shade of objection is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the ...”

“... died in Sydney when Michael was 14. On the boat home Margaret met a rich middle-aged entrepreneur, James Patrick Anderson, known as Andy, who effectively became Michael’s father, paying for holidays abroad and a private education at Clifton College in Bristol, though according to Spoto they remained ‘strangers’ to each other. Before he went to boarding ...”

“... And there would be those who would resist invasion: Bob Dylan (now clearly revealed as the Henry James of our age) not least. But the scene was set. The place: the Factory, Warhol’s studio, on East 47th Street. The fuel: hard drugs, especially amphetamines. The project: to condense the history of metropolitan interiors into a slow home movie, based on ...”

“... according to the Tusas, the British Government and bureaucracy had concluded (the Lord Chancellor, Simon, scrupling half-heartedly) that the major war criminals should not be tried, but put to death by executive action. Much was made of the precedent of the relegation of Napoleon to St Helena by a decision of the Congress of Vienna. The Tusas do not record ...”

“... college equities. And falling’), they meet up with Hinton’s former tutor, a dashing don called Simon Undark, famous for wearing a tie with a goldfish on it, ‘punningly shaped like a kipper’. Undark informs them that it is to a certain spot in Ireland that they next must go: the text they seek seems to have only a notional existence, in fuzzy ...”

“... quotations from fogies of yore condemning innovations – the harmonics of Wagner, the prose of James Joyce – that have since achieved canonical status. Mitchell does not disappoint us on this score. He quotes Constant Lambert, in the Thirties, attacking jazz. Mitchell’s logic is slightly different from that of his predecessors. Their argument is ...”

“... Blades Company reveals its ingenious methods of creative accounting. After William III had routed James II in Ireland, the Crown sold off confiscated rebel estates to its soldiery. What if a company could persuade these men to swap their new lands for shares? They would be relieved of managing distant assets and gain a rising stock. The architects of this ...”

“... from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – ...”

“... by giving Ofwat false information; the reporter who broke a company whistleblower’s story, Simon Fluendy, described it later, with justifiable pride, as a story that had made a real difference. But Severn Trent has been fined, and the system of private water companies continues unchanged. One day recently I went to Worcester to visit Malcolm ...”

“... a kind of courage of which I would have been incapable.19 May. I’m reading The Unaccompanied, Simon Armitage’s latest collection of poems. They always ring bells, though, like Larkin, he’ll often take off at the end of a poem when I don’t always follow. There’s a lovely funny poem in this collection, ‘Poundland’, which is enviably ...”

“... conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a ...”