“... was soon recognised as one of the greatest books ever written. In the second he was a sleek London gentleman wallowing in power, wealth and prestige and devoting his intellectual energy to esoteric studies of the Bible. How could they be the same person? Newton’s first biographer, Jean-Baptiste Biot, proposed the classic solution in 1822: Newton was ‘the ...”

“... question. Kermode invites us to pause over the elaborate social coding of Annan’s description of David Eccles as ‘a Wykehamist with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’ – but also over the blunter evocation of Richard Hoggart as ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’. Our Age had its traditions, ‘was a ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... diary might not be quite a classic, but it becomes one in the hands of its exemplary editor David Vaisey, who has trimmed it to not much more than a third of its original length, and richly supplemented its information about the village’s inhabitants and about Turner’s family and business. In this way he quietly helps to substantiate the observation ...”

“... up as foreign secretary. True, Sir Henry Wotton famously defined an ambassador as ‘an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’, but that hardly implies that the man in overall charge of Her Majesty’s ambassadors should trade so often in professional porkies. I remember talking to a Tory insider when Cameron and Johnson were ...”

“... I think, as one of the lay brothers of Charterhouse, a venerable almshouse for impecunious gentleman pensioners in Clerkenwell. It was in his little room there, one of dozens of snug bachelor units off Charterhouse’s splendid panelled corridors, that he made his recordings. And yet this old empire man, this Londoner, never thought of his essential ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a long ...”

“... to shopping at Selfridges and tea at the Cumberland or the Regent Palace, often together with some gentleman friend. In the evening she’d go out to the pictures or the theatre or a whist drive or a bridge club. Her leisure activities tended to be different from my father’s. She was good at cards; he didn’t play at all. She loved swimming; he couldn’t ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the killings of two Palestinians. The man, David Axelrod, is not related to Leon Trotsky. A man with the same name, who is a descendant of Trotsky, was questioned briefly by the police in a case of mistaken identity. The arcane character of this item, which was at the top of that day’s menu, might make ...”

“... available, well-used moulds. One of these turned up, somewhat oddly, in the New Statesman, where David Selbourne argued that what had been persistently overlooked was the fact that India wasn’t a country at all, but a sub-continent. This thesis has some truth in it, but there hangs about it an ancient and fish-like smell. It was, after all, a standard ...”

“... his twenties as a midshipman in the navy, though to his chagrin he never saw action, and as a gentleman farmer, first on land bequeathed him by his father on the shores of Lake Otsego in upstate New York; and then on a 42-acre property in Scarsdale that belonged to his wife’s family, who owned much of Westchester County. He had enjoyed dabbling in ...”

“... if he could spice up the charges against him. He arranged for Oliver the Spy, masquerading as a gentleman revolutionary, to visit Hone in his cell and attempt to persuade him into joining a treasonable plot to ‘crush’ the government. Oliver visited Wooler, too, who had also been arrested and was being held in a nearby cell. Both radicals recognised a ...”

“... the reviewers in mind. In his novel’s opening instalment, he provokingly imagined ‘all the gentleman reviewers’ sitting in solemn judgment on him. In the second instalment he was already absorbing their criticism of the first. ‘-You Messrs. The monthly Reviewers!--how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did?’ Yet should some reviewer, next ...”