“... people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or 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 ...”

“... his accommodation no more at this moment than he would in the future, he survived well enough on a small private income and some reviewing. He was not short of friends, including some as grand as T.S. Eliot, who admired Empson as well as finding him funny (‘dirtier and more distrait than ever … most refreshing to see him’). But the war was coming ...”

“... a barricade, too broken-backed to shoulder the great historical tasks assigned them? If so, men small wonder that Marx ended up turning to an ‘inhuman’ revolutionary force to reoccupy the place disappointingly vacated by a human one. Entertaining and irresistible speculations of this sort can be deeply misleading, however, especially if they distract ...”

“... to publish her first big book, the 1990 novel The trick is to keep breathing, with Polygon, the small publisher of which Edinburgh Review is a part. It is conventional, when discussing ‘the new Glasgow writing’, a movement taken to involve man of pairts Alasdair Gray and poet Tom Leonard as well as Kelman and Galloway, to open on a sort of pen-Polaroid ...”

“... eyes suggesting mystic withdrawal. Its grossness, in profile, makes one think of a cow. But when small boys or bored askaris tease it, it is transformed, it is doglike. One takes evasive action as it sprints past to pose, ears cocked horizontally, staring at its persecutors, on the bank by the clubhouse steps; one expects it to bark. It is said that, before ...”

“... The new government of 1979 had no grand plans for privatisation. It was intended that a number of small, state-owned enterprises would be sold off, but even the Tory radicals did not contemplate taking the utilities – natural monopolies providing essential services – out of the public sector. An increasingly peremptory Prime Minister, however, came to see privatisation as a ‘central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism’ and ‘reclaiming territory for freedom ...”

“... at which it can manageably be renounced altogether. For example, when, near the end of the novel, Stephen Latimer declares that he has fallen in love, genuinely and for real, Miss Morrow’s response is ‘Oh, I see.’ Barbara Pym continues: ‘Miss Morrow had difficulty in keeping her disappointment out of her voice. She had somehow expected something less ...”

“... has at times analysed wonder – notably in relation to exploration and discovery, as in Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvellous Possessions – but has more pervasively and implicitly celebrated it and capitalised on it, offering up Renaissance England for the bedazzlement of American graduate students as itself a cabinet of wonderful curiosities. Both ...”

“... and his little brother, Allen, head of the CIA. Both were former legal advisers to United Fruit. Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger’s classic history of the coup, Bitter Fruit (1982), showed that many of the players behind it were either United Fruit stockholders, or angling for a seat on the company board, or ...”

“... to him, to have his intellectual property pirated. When it came to such things, Hooke was, as Stephen Inwood rightly says, ‘a rough fighter’. That attitude was at once wholly natural and deeply problematic in Restoration scientific circles. As Rob Iliffe and Adrian Johns have shown, it was the norm for mechanics and tradesmen vigorously to contest ...”

“... brothers. At the Cliveden swimming-pool Jack met, not for the first time, Astor’s osteopath, Stephen Ward, ‘the Doctor’ of the quadrilateral, and the exceptionally pretty Christine Keeler. Profumo, as he later put it, ‘was extremely taken by Christine, whom I thought was Ward’s girlfriend, but he did not seem to be particularly possessive about ...”

“... rendition’ thanks to the work of journalists writing for mainstream media. One of these is Stephen Grey, a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. His new book divides fairly neatly into an account of how he and his colleagues uncovered the CIA’s secret flights to torture centres and ...”

“... as entitled to stick up for its vital interests as the largest. If there were to be vetos, then small states should have them too. Of course this ideal was moderated by reality. But this was a Europe which, as a Danish foreign minister later observed, was designed to make the continent safe for small nations. In the ...”

“... Sillars, the other central figure in the book is the SNP’s onetime guru-in-chief, the late Stephen Maxwell, whose name is largely unknown even to those who follow Scottish politics. Nobody did more than Maxwell to formulate the now dominant idea of left-wing nationalism. As late as 1982, Alex Salmond and other members of the Maxwellite 79 Group were ...”

“... life which combines both pride (one scene takes us on a detour to Cary Grant’s birthplace) and small-mindedness. I especially liked the DIY assistant who, on being told that her work colleague has just brutally murdered her husband, replies: ‘I always said she had a hard little face.’ Stevenson’s novel must be regarded as an interesting hybrid rather ...”