“... led a Quaker consortium in buying up the land and began to look for investors. He approached Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found ...”

“... being used to underpin Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major novelists – Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Tobias Smollett – interrogated what Skinner calls ‘Whig complacencies’. Britons did not groan under the yoke of absolute monarchy, but many of them lived at the whim of others, whether as servants, marriageable young ...”

“... to rest in Tyneham Churchyard where so many of his old friends, his grandparents and his Uncle Tom already lay in shell-shocked repose. But Wilson followed the advice of his civil servants and the Army kept its range. Thus did the labour Party lose its solitary Tyneham supporter. John Gould joined the Liberal Party in disgust, and the campaign dwindled ...”

“... on Loach and Leigh, Powell and Pressburger, Lean and Reed, the Boultings and Woodfall (although Tom Jones does get a long and interesting discussion here). Or at least, that’s the way this book might have been seen fifteen years ago. Now, in fact, many of the works he writes about have been canonised, none more so than the ‘unholy trinity’ of folk ...”

“... you off my feet. Something has been throbbing within me. Oh it’s been beating like the incessant tom-tom in the primitive jungle. There’s something that I must ask you . . . Mrs Rittenhouse: Why, Captain, I’m surprised. Groucho: Well, it may be a surprise to you but it’s been on my mind for weeks. It’s just ...”

“... local museum of my home town, Shrewsbury, from the studio of the outwardly respectable taxidermist Henry Shaw (alas, no relation). Genuine great auk skins would have been stuffed and made lifelike by taxidermists who had never seen one in the wild, often rendering questionable choices canonical. In 1912, the editorial board of the American Ornithological ...”

“... and census enumerators might very well be supplemented by a highly personalised nickname – Old Tom, Long Tom, Short Tom, or even, according to Rev. Alfred Easther, a 19th-century Yorkshire dialectologist, Wantem, Blackcop and Muddlinpin – it might better be described as an outbreak ...”

“... Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged ...”

“... to argue that Newman and Woodward were ‘the last movie stars’ at a moment when the 60-year-old Tom Cruise has just had the first $100 million opening of his career, for Top Gun: Maverick, in which he not only acted but performed many of the most dangerous stunts. How would you describe Tom Cruise (or Will Smith or Johnny ...”

“... Lime and Lukacs. Thematically, Doctor Criminale shapes up as a kind of post-Maastricht version of Henry James’s international theme: English ingenuousness discovers corruption beneath the seductive surfaces of European civilisation. For all his postgraduate knowingness about Barthes and other purveyors of the higher froggy nonsense, Francis is revealed to ...”

“... only tycoon with a wholly distinctive prose style. It is on show in a furious email Black wrote to Tom Bower, protesting that Bower’s forthcoming book about Lord and Lady Black was going to be ‘a heartwarming story of two sleazy, spivvy, contemptible people, who enjoyed a fraudulent and unjust elevation; were exposed, and ground to powder in a just ...”

“... Harold Wilson, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Lester Pearson and Henry Kissinger. They also included every Soviet defector who had come after him. These men had been sent, Golitsyn said, to discredit him because the KGB knew how dangerous he was to their master plan. By the time he got round to the case of ...”

“... and custom which inspired those young enthusiasts. We open them beside the solicitor’s clerk, Henry Crabb Robinson, who later recalled: ‘It made me feel more generously. I had never before, nor ... have I ever since felt so strongly the duty of not living to one’s self, but of having for one’s sole duty the good of the community.’ The 1793 edition ...”

“... for almost a century of the Boy’s Own Paper). McAleer also uses the records of Tom Harrisson’s Mass-Observation project, which monitored (among much else) Londoners’ reading habits over the period 1937-46. All publishing history tends towards the condition of statistic and anecdote. McAleer’s book is rich in both departments. The text ...”

“... I understand, more correctly rendered ‘Horn of Antimony’. If there were a Spark Notebook, like Henry James’s, an imaginable entry might run: ‘Suppose that in our time some rich man were not only deep in the study of Job but himself in a situation of – well, shall I say discomfort, interested in the vague analogy between himself and his ...”