“... the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was published around 1750 he was not ...”

“... hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the shrubberies. For the English the ideal society needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life ...”

“... stone in the aggregate was calculated to harmonise with Somerset House, the Royal Festival Hall and Waterloo Bridge (which it still does, because unlike so many owners of Brutalist buildings, the NT actually cleans it), and about the complex process of creating its shuttered finish. This was painstaking: ‘Air bubbles which naturally cling to the ...”

“... Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in their contribution, if only because they partook of all wings and of none, the ...”

“... more complicated than anything within my own experience, they were good reading after all that James Bond nonsense … Actually, I have all his books and have enjoyed them all, except The Honourable Schoolboy; it was so long and so far-fetched that it faded long before the end.’ The second half, though, is something else altogether. In it Sisman appears ...”

“... It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in the arts ...”

“... for the Presidency himself, but F.D.R. put him out of action by sending him to the Court of St James (where his semi-English airs and his ambivalence about fascism were not altogether unfashionable), and he had to be satisfied with passing on the ‘discipline of lust’ and the ‘cult of courage’ to his sons. With Joe Jr dead in the war, it was left to ...”

“... Put briefly, his theme runs thus. The city fathers, defenders of monarchy, not Parliament, under James I, and again allied to the Crown from the autumn of 1641, were nevertheless temporarily ‘alienated’ from their natural ally during the 1630s. The City was estranged as a result of Royal attacks on municipal and corporate privileges which have long ...”

“... of various family members. His exploration of the hitherto obscure roles of Cassandra and of James, the eldest brother, is one of his best discoveries. In the years in which Jane was at last getting published, Cassandra can already be seen as a family watchdog. When Sense and Sensibility emerged in 1811, Cassandra begged everyone to keep Jane’s ...”

“... camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a heart valve. Sark is the world’s first Dark Sky Island, benefiting from an absence of streetlights. Its leading politician became a powerboating world ...”

“... the grave. Also excluded from the original edition were, for example, William Jardine and Sir James Matheson, the founders of the famous company which bear their name. Their refusal to agree to Chinese requests to desist from the opium trade led to the disgraceful Opium War of 1840-2, a war which Jardine suggested could be brought to an end by a simple ...”

“... and (less controversially, indeed uncontroversially) the universal popularity of the music hall. Thompson’s picture of the Victorian working class – as an autonomous, powerful sector of the society generating and achieving for itself goals which resembled but also crucially differed from bourgeois goals – has some important economic ...”

“... at the price of an incomes policy that eventually drove the low-paid into revolt. The last days of James Callaghan, with grave-diggers on strike and NUPE pulling the plug on hospital patients, were piteous and shameful and the ‘winter of discontent’ ensured the victory of Mrs Thatcher. Though Labour were out, the future was still uncertain. Few realised in ...”

“... produced any better or more effective public servants than Oliver Franks, Edwin Plowden, Robert Hall, Edward Bridges, Alec Cairncross, Edward Hall-Patch, Richard Hopkins and Roger Makins, to name only a few of the ‘mandarins’ who served the Labour Government so loyally. Therein lay the problem, however. They did what ...”

“... huge (given a big enough counterweight you could lower St Paul’s into its now roofless turbine hall), and it’s also slap-bang in the middle of London. From the roof level, which I visited the other day with its current developer, Rob Tincknell of the Battersea Power Station Development Company, the city heaves away on all sides in a modest swell of glass ...”