“... the New Age simultaneously, write prefaces to new editions, sum up carefully on the business side, grant interviews and talk at great length and with indescribable sense and spirit ... ’ The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters have been edited and annotated in their entirety by Catherine Kerrigan, and they show how many of MacDiarmid’s attitudes and ...”

“... at Wharton Hall, under the easy regime of Nanny Forbes from Elgin: she somehow turns into Nanny Grant, Nanny Findlay and Nanny Ritchie, before the author changes his mind and admits that he had no nanny at all – he has decided to be melancholy and make a bid for our sympathy. He was brought up amateurishly in Greater Bradford by Paul and Bertha ...”

“... him as one. Darwin’s status counted in more pecuniary ways. He secured a £1000 government grant to publish his Beagle researches (even though he had travelled in a private capacity). His resulting Journal – ‘interesting as a Persian tale’, as one sailor put it – opened more doors. The contrast with Huxley’s predicament a generation later is ...”

“... words – a federal Britain would be ‘artificial, arbitrary and highly legalistic’. When James Callaghan’s Labour government did finally propose devolved government in Scotland and Wales, the voters seemed equally tepid; in Scotland only 52 per cent voted Yes in 1979, short of the required 40 per cent of the electorate; in Wales only 20 per cent ...”

“... long reign and hankered for a change. When that change materialised, however, in the person of James I, they became increasingly unsure that they liked it. The story Dobson and Watson have to tell really begins with that little group of plays by Heywood and Dekker which in the early Jacobean years brought several ‘squeaking’ Elizabeths onto the public ...”

“... sciences hit their stride at the end of the 19th century with the work of Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, James Frazer, Henri Lévy-Bruhl and others, this rigorously rationalist mode of investigation, as in some uncanny return of the repressed, found itself reverting again and again to religious subjects. As Durkheim was beginning work on his magisterial Elementary ...”

“... pebbles alongside the De La Warr Pavilion. I walked with Kötting to view the pyramidical tomb of James Burton, founding speculator of St Leonards: you peep inside through a convenient slit. He grabbed my camera, held it at arm’s length and snapped a double portrait. But when we met again, by arrangement, at the spot where I’d witnessed him shooting his ...”

“... defined the ‘atmosphere in the cab’, they often date badly. The student of elevator scenes in James Bond movies, for example, will discover only that while Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace (2008) instantly unleashes a crisply definitive, neoliberal backwards head-butt, Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) has to absorb a good deal of heavy ...”

“... in the Protestant league – as ‘le plus accompli gentilhomme de l’Europe’, yet was slow to grant political favours either to him or to his brother. The knighthood she bestowed on Philip allowed him to serve as proxy for Casimir when he was admitted in absentia to the Order of the Garter, but only obliquely conceded Sidney’s personal qualities and ...”

“... were Democrats, but perhaps the most vociferous and resolute among them was a Republican senator, James Couzens from Michigan, a millionaire himself, who set up a Senate investigation of the Internal Revenue Service. Mellon or someone else at the Treasury (Cannadine doesn’t make clear whose idea it was) retaliated by having another look at Couzens’s 1919 ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... He has tried, and also given up on, being a university student in Aberdeen, where he blew all his grant money on alcohol and prostitutes in the space of a term. Sometimes he lives in London, where he is part of a syndicate which makes its money by claiming welfare benefits under false pretences. Sometimes he is back in Leith, hanging about with family and old ...”

“... individual in Britain; and only three other politicians, William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and North, featured in prints more. Yet, as Robinson points out, before 1778 visual representations of Burke were rare: and this is suggestive. In retrospect, Burke’s speeches in the 1760s and early 1770s, warning of deteriorating British relations ...”