“... or at the shockingly brutal Northern ‘school’ where the hero is sent to die), and if he has little of Dickens’s generous sympathy or (consequently) humour, he is pretty much his equal as a documentarist. All the same, while reading The Quincunx I couldn’t help wondering what the novel would amount to – what would be left of it, in fact – if you ...”

“... made a will which disbursed sums that did not exist. In addition, Wilkes was a libertine. He had little or no religion, but an inclination for sexual adventures that lasted well into old age. In this respect, his apprenticeship was served in the Hell Fire Club, and he learnt his trade well. His life was all ‘blasphemy and bawdry’. Unlike some ...”

“... is that Brexit has so overwhelmed the business of government and public discourse that there is little legislation of any significance and, as a result, nothing to vote on. Three-line whips on a Wednesday or a Thursday are now virtually unheard of. Sometimes weeks go by without a meaningful vote. Many MPs have young families to whom they are anxious to ...”

“... not on public platforms), had always accepted the possibility of total surrender: it made little or no provision for partial defeat. Men as temperamentally dissimilar as Arthur Balfour and the 15th Earl of Derby had agreed that Pitt’s Act of Union provided a framework for the government of Ireland which ...”

“... When Malcolm Muggeridge and I were young we used to speculate about the end of civilisation. Little did we expect it would come in our lifetimes. I regard myself as a loyal member of the Labour Party. By this I mean that I usually disagree with what it does. Take the indignation against the cricketers who have gone to play cricket in South Africa. I am ...”

“... to London – via Florence, Tibet, Persia, Mecca, Khartoum and Montpellier (where he undertook a little research into coal-tar derivatives) – to surprise Dr Watson at his Paddington consulting rooms some years later, in the guise of an elderly bibliophile. By the time of Holmes’s resurrection in ‘The Empty House’ (1903), ...”

“... me that Lucas goes easy on revealing failure just because he likes nationalistic stereotyping too little to engage with it. What a strange character is Tennyson’s Arthur in Idylls of the King, for instance: the only Arthur since the 12th century not to be the incestuous father of ...”

“... was, he asserted, the people’s choice. The Times followed up the next day with a hatchet job by Arthur Mizener, entitled ‘Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?’ It was, Parini concludes, ‘a sorry moment for American literary culture’. A friend of the author’s declared himself outraged that ‘Americans weren’t rooting for ...”

“... fight For all those gritty doctrines he has spoken On that day when they have to be renounced And Arthur Scargill’s strike bid must be trounced. But Arthur’s rhetoric is like his hair. Though spurious, transparent and bombastic, It’s legal and has some right to be there. The threat it poses to the state is drastic But ...”

“... at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold presence in human life and culture’. Knight concludes that ‘Robin Hood’s biography is mythic in that the multiform figure does not have physical identity.’ His biography is thus doubly ...”

“... basis of the Folk Club movement, powerfully renewed these memories, and cast them in epic form (Arthur Scargill’s first job, when he joined the Barnsley Young Communist League, was to be made ‘Ballads and Blues’ secretary). Aneurin Bevan, a glittering representative of the South Wales coalfield, and the most accomplished orator of his day, made the ...”

“... his death meant liberation. Her breezy assumption that there would always be enough money, with a little left over, caused her friends and family much bother. She was also a publisher’s nightmare: the genial George Smith ruefully recalled that her manuscripts were ‘a medley of pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, written here and there and fastened ...”

“... When love meets love, breast to breast, God interposes, An unacknowledged guest, And leaves a little child among our roses. We love, God makes: in our sweet mirth God spies occasion for a birth.Then is it his, or is it ours? I know not – he is fond of flowers. The notion of linking Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and ...”

“... Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun can hardly be dismissed as unimportant, but it must be said that little of world-shaking significance has happened there lately, although there are signs that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has yielded to ...”

“... I feel it in my bones; it’s the light, the smell, the extraordinary sense of space and all the little things as well. The dust and scuttle of the sheep when two or three are gathered together, it’s really beastly, but I shall smell it and hear it till I die.’Australia haunts his first novel, A Bride from the Bush, serialised in the Cornhill in ...”