“... this was Alan Warner’s voice rather than Morvern Callar’s seemed confirmed when someone else took over the narration. These Demented Lands is narrated in part by a character called Aircrash Investigator, and his prose style is uncannily similar to Morvern’s. He, too, uses the word ‘whorls’. He employs the Morvernish colour-term ...”

“... II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the tide turned even earlier, in 1332, at the now forgotten Battle of Dupplin Moor, where an unofficial army of dissident Scots and dispossessed ...”

“... English oak [with] a woman’s face on the back’. The lower orders collected possessions too. John Elmesley can’t have earned much as a servant to a wax chandler, but he took in his godson, Robert Sharp, and in his will provided him with all the things a little boy needed: a small featherbed with two pairs of fitted ...”

“... a programme about literary life in Britain during the Second World War; the contributors included John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly. The show was stolen, however, by a figure in a voluminous overcoat and dark glasses, whose recollections were delivered slowly, deadpan, between puffs on a large cigar. A month later, at the age of 52, Julian Maclaren-Ross died ...”

“... beliefs and values on people in the past. And they denigrated it as ‘reductive’, because it took political thought and action to be determined by social and economic ‘realities’. What the revisionists offered in return varied. For some it was localism, which meant understanding politics from the localities ‘in’ rather than the metropolis ...”

“... periods. He was progressive without being deeply political. He published a book on Boswell and took to the Himalayas a copy of Robert Bridges’s wartime poetry anthology, The Spirit of Man. He was a brilliant but arguably reckless climber, personally responsible for seven Sherpa deaths in 1922, while making a run at the summit against all prudent ...”

“... is that, at least until recently, Democrats haven’t even hinted that they would support it. When John Kerry ran for president in 2004 45 million Americans had no health insurance, the poverty rate had increased for three consecutive years, and two massive tax cuts had been handed to his opponents’ wealthiest supporters. Yet he refused to make much of these ...”

“... Broch to Milan Kundera and critics from Clement Greenberg to Saul Friedländer, all of whom took it up at periods when technologies of mass culture and mass politics were intensifying: Broch and Greenberg after the dramatic rise of Fascist regimes in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and Kundera and Friedländer as the totalitarian regimes decayed during ...”

“... easy way to complete the forms. The same applies to statistics from Egyptian asylums supplied by John Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Warnock admitted to a ‘total ignorance of Arabic’, which must have made sensitive diagnosis difficult. He also diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as ‘an infectious mental disorder’ and ...”

“... that the car had at last brought a major blood sport to Britain. His fellow poet and road-hog, John Masefield, also exulted as he traversed the Downs at furious speed, his Overland emitting ‘soul-animating strains’ (doubtless from a Gabriel horn). And the man who wrote to the motoring press urging drivers not to stop after an accident if they had a ...”

“... and things that may not be done by the rule of law may be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal ...”

“... There is a touch​ of Shylock in this,’ John Kerrigan says of a moment in King Lear. There are touches of Shylock in many places outside The Merchant of Venice, and indeed outside Shakespeare altogether, but this one is of unusual interest. It is in Cordelia’s speech responding to her father’s question about which of his daughters loves him most – well, to be precise, which of his daughters he is to say loves him most ...”

“... traitor. When he questioned the jurisdiction of the specially assembled high court, its president, John Bradshawe, replied: ‘There is a contract and bargain made between the king and his people … The one tie, the one bond, is the bond of protection that is due from the sovereign. The other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject. Sir, if ...”

“... included Mandeville’s ‘Vindication’ of his book. A sequel, Fable of the Bees Part II, which took the form of a set of dialogues, arrived at the end of 1728. A further sequel, An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, was published in 1732, the year before Mandeville’s death. These accumulating components seem, at first sight, to be clearly ...”

“... cold. Pepys looked at the megaliths in 1668 and shrugged: ‘God knows what their use was.’ John Aubrey, the first person to make a serious study of stone circles, put his finger on the problem: ‘These Antiquities are so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them.’ He developed a more effective method. Using measurements and comparative surveys of ...”