“... the opening of the Glasgow Empire Exhibition in 1938, waving newspapers and hats in the air as George VI and his wife entered Ibrox Park in a horse-drawn carriage. ‘The queen and I are happy to be in Scotland once more,’ he said with a stammer, before praising Glasgow for organising such a show of unity ‘whilst the country was still under the cloud ...”

“... rather extravagantly – is a set of views about black people that might put him on a par with George Wallace, a circumstance requiring you to suddenly un-imagine the noble lawyer, now no longer the decency machine who has long lived in your head as segregation’s mythic antidote. To some commentators, he is the same man, a Southern agrarian fighting ...”

“... Necropolis.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The sign could say: “Up here, something did happen to Andrew O’Hagan. Like each of us, he wondered if it would happen. And it did.”’ Something happened to my second ever schoolteacher, Mrs Wallace. We saw her totally somethinged in her coffin under a huge crucifix of Jesus Christ, to whom, by the look of the ...”

“... Can William Hague draw any comfort from the experience of his similarly beleaguered predecessor Andrew Bonar Law, a scarcely visible figure in the pantheon of Tory leaders? What is best known about him is that he is ‘unknown’. Lord Blake’s celebrated biography, The Unknown Prime Minister (1955), took its cue from Asquith’s perhaps apocryphal remark ...”

“... works of Dickens, James, Austen or Joyce (I searched on Gutenberg). It doesn’t appear in George Eliot’s books either (not even in Scenes of Clerical Life, or in the one she translated, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity) and, for all the expiring heroes in their novels, neither Hardy nor the Brontës had any use for the phrase. It was certainly ...”

“... on the gate, ‘No Guns’ – the young women studying English wanted to talk about Foucault and George Eliot. Near the place where Yasir Arafat is buried, graffiti on the wall says, ‘ctrl+alt+delete’, the command you key in when your computer freezes. And that is the feeling one gets in Ramallah, the feeling of a system that is paralysed and awaiting ...”

“... diffident ones would nowadays turn to something briefer and more selective, such as either of R. George Thomas’s introductions to the Collected Works, and preferably the one in paperback that came out earlier this year*; or Vernon Scannell’s pamphlet written for the British Council in 1963. In any case, one always wonders about the readership of a work ...”

“... we come to Philip’s internal strife, we have to contend with the randy bonhomie of old King George. It is said that American viewers are distressed to find the word ‘cunt’ used in the first episode, spoken by George VI (Jared Harris) to his valet, but perhaps this is merely the latest in a long line of gifts from ...”

“... policy in a generation’. Yet the president’s words have a familiar ring. In September 1999 George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, introduced his defence programme at the Citadel military school in Charleston. ‘Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable,’ he said. ‘Our military must be able to identify targets ...”

“... as a brilliant, transgressive genius went quiet. It appeared in bits and snatches in such works as George Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907), and maintained a fitful presence in the pulps and silent movies. As a result, Our Vampires, Ourselves moves briskly through the decades that separate Stoker’s novel from Browning’s film, coming back to life ...”

“... were dancing to 1980s pop music and getting excited. A number of drunk men were dressed as St George, wearing England flags and Crusader helmets. Eyes swivelling, pints held aloft, standing on chairs or doing the conga, they were clearly at home in the holiday camp, whose ‘true intent’, it used to say on a neon sign over the swimming pool, ‘is all ...”

“... contrast to the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998, which arose from a sexual escapade, that of Andrew Johnson 130 years earlier involved some of the most intractable problems in American history. How should the nation be reunited after the Civil War? Who is entitled to American citizenship and the right to vote? What should be the status of the four ...”

“... indignation, when the Average Joe turns out to be His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, KG, KT, GCB, OM, AK, QSO, PC, ADC, Earl of Chester, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. ‘Yes, yes,’ the royal biographer appears to ...”

“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral ...”

“... two years old. But the colours stayed. And the noise. The day of the Rent Strikers’ march on George Square. He was there in the arms of Effie Bawn, and sometimes he walked on his first legs, leaning out from her hand, the big gold band on her finger. The morning was harsh. The Glasgow puddles held every oil and grime of the sky that day. Fog was ...”