“... the House of Commons Defence Committee that Iran was capable of producing biological weapons. The Butler Report on UK intelligence about WMD, published in July 2004, told us nothing about Iran’s biological warfare capabilities. They didn’t feature in Goss’s speech on ‘Global Intelligence Challenges 2005’, and ...”

“... for all humanity or kind of the same, but more so. Pass the popcorn. Or wait until your robot butler can do it for ...”

“... them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our ...”

“... of categories like ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ have recognised the utility of what Judith Butler describes as ‘necessary errors of identity’. Saying homosexuals don’t exist wasn’t very helpful to men and women fighting hateful prejudice.Comfort had experienced group sex at Sandstone, the quasi-intentional community founded by ...”

“... father, Lionel, a leading banker and industrialist whose own father had been Gordon Selfridge’s butler. Robert seemed a thorough aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of ...”

“... San was chiefly the work of the Dutch, and some British historians have accepted this view, but John Philip, a hawk-eyed missionary in the 1820s, knew that this wasn’t so. The system ‘which rendered the Dutch name so infamous’, he wrote, is now being carried on ‘in all its horrors’ under the British Government: ‘Impatient to obtain undisturbed ...”

“... too little and too lately known,’ Dryden wrote in a pompous, self-serving poem prefixed to John Oldham’s Remains in Verse and Prose (1684). Oldham had died of smallpox the previous December, at the age of 30, at the house of the Earl of Kingston, a young nobleman who had recently become his patron. He left behind a large body of work, now available ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George ...”

“... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...”

“... with a pair of wide-bodied decanters on it. His shoulders tilt slightly forward; he moves with the butler’s measured plod as he bears the precious cargo of wine or port to the table. This anonymous figure is almost certainly Doyle’s depiction of Francis Barber – Dr Johnson’s ‘faithful negro servant’, as Boswell calls him. We cannot be quite ...”

“... and warm hearts, not for pedantic historians. Gallacher was one of those who put it about that John Maclean was out of his mind, literally hallucinating, when he ran his Scottish Workers Republican Party in opposition to the infant CPGB. Nevertheless, the name of the great Marxist dominie was repeatedly invoked, and Pat Lally, Glasgow’s Labour ...”

“... his painting, and he opened a showroom in South Kensington to display his rugs and furniture. Rab Butler, then a young MP, and his wife, Sydney Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, commissioned him to design their dining room. Interior design led to a growing circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his ...”

“... University, where the novel stages a postdated, highly fanciful version of Derrida’s clash with John Searle and pushes the boat out still further on the story’s farcical and shaggy-dog aspects. Methodological tensions play out like scuffles between the Jets and the Sharks: ‘You analytic pricks!’ ‘Take your Derrida boys and piss ...”

“... been allowed entry to Britain on a ‘married couple’ visa, which meant employment as cook-and-butler but not being able to live with their daughter. In Other People’s Houses, their employer is given the name Mrs Willoughby (just one of the book’s nods to Austen; the Darcys also feature). One day she asks Franzi if she would mind serving tea although ...”