“... literary tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last ...”

“... when he rose to power. As a child he had visited England, most likely with his father (‘Captain Tom’), receiving at least a partial education. In the conventional accounts he is presented as an enlightened visionary who sought to bring contemporary science and letters to a new nation modelled on the states of Europe. But it seems that his confederation ...”

“... sense of power and destiny stronger than in the aftermath of World War Two. Not everyone shared Henry Luce’s view of the post-war era as the ‘American Century’, in which the United States would impose its values and institutions on all societies, confident that in doing so it would be ‘lifting the life of mankind’. But Luce expressed widely-shared ...”

“... vanity is one of the things one is most generally conscious of – or so I find,’ Waugh wrote to Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green). Four months after the breach, he wrote to Yorke again, saying that he (Waugh) had gone on far too long in a fog of sentimentality, hiding away from everyone, and that ‘all that must ...”

“... had more money than the rival bidders, the fan-based consortium of Tony Tighe, Mike Dyble and Tom Canon. His easy switch of loyalties is anathema to the fans. Last year, packers in Johnson’s Birkenhead factory were paid less than £3 an hour. The cost of an average ticket at Everton’s Goodison Park was £13. Johnson’s shareholding in Everton, for ...”

“... to school, he was eroticised by the many young girls surrounding him at home. When the family of Henry Liddell joined the new Dean in Oxford, his wife and their four children (more were on the way) offered a kind of mirror image of the Dodgsons, and of Carroll’s own sisters during his childhood at Daresbury, when they played charades and other games ...”

“... on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his opponents with his ...”

“... the second Mrs Piper (‘my silken Myfanwy’) back into his imagined childhood: ‘Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.’ The real Myfanwy decided to start a magazine bright enough to show the world that Britain was not beyond the reach of international art. ‘The battle has been pitched between abstract painting and sculpture and surrealist ...”

“... car had got into his paintings occasionally, and the stones all the time had looked less like big Henry Moores. I wish Nash had learned more from his friend Edward Burra. And so to the dump at Cowley. Totes Meer is quite a large painting – five feet wide and going on for three feet tall – and it puts its new size to good use. Gone is the Chirico ...”

“... capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ‘absorbed so many imprints that no complete record of them ...”

“... will be concerned with the children of Raven’s repertory characters – Peter Morrison MP, Tom Llewyllyn, the journalist turned don, and even the hideously disfigured homosexual, Fielding Gray. The sins of the parents may well be visited upon these children. The more faithful of Simon Raven’s readers will look back at his earlier saga to remind ...”

“... have happened like that, I suppose, but it does sound rather like a mixture of Walter Mitty and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. There is the tone here of a conceited man who thinks himself just as good a writer as the famous man he is writing about – and also much more manly, worldly and socially acceptable. It is, in fact, precisely the tone of Trelawney’s ...”

“... and the World Bank were eclipsed. The head of the third bank, the Bank of America, a man called Tom Clausen, lurks in the background. Since he has now taken over from Robert McNamara as chief of the World Bank, he would almost certainly have taken a more prominent role in Sampson’s book but for one thing: he was the only top banker who could not find time ...”

“... it might not otherwise have roused. Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (the murdered man). Sir John Henry (‘Jock’) Delves Broughton (the presumed murderer). Diana, Broughton’s second wife, who was later to become successively the wife of Gilbert de Préville Colvile and of Tom, the fourth Baron Delamere. Gwladys, Lady ...”

“... run into Clayhanger, and (Wells again) The History of Mr Polly; perhaps the Antipodean outsider Henry Handel Richardson would have scooped it with The Getting of Wisdom. In 1924 Forster’s publishers might have thought they had a chance with his block-buster, A Passage to India. For once, Wells wasn’t dogging him: but there was Maurice Baring’s ...”