“... unexpected high point in terms of historical house-hunting was provided by the British Ambassador, Gordon Wetherell. A tall, genial man in his early fifties, he had already upstaged his Gallic counterpart by giving the first part of his speech at the Maison Rimbaud in fluent Amharic. On the morning of our return to Addis, I went off with him and his wife Rosie ...”

“... lost his Midas touch.’ In October 2004, he carried the first of a long series of eulogies to Gordon Brown, then ‘odds-on to be prime minister before the end of 2008’. ‘The Brown transition,’ Goodhart wrote, ‘could help to realise the centre-left’s dream of governing Britain for a generation.’ What had happened? Nothing had shaken ...”

“... some reviewers from praising or damning the book for doing things it carefully avoids. Edmund Gordon, in the Telegraph, wrote that Hamid’s use of the second person allows him ‘to implicitly pair the trajectory of his hero’s life with the trajectories of millions of other lives’ when what it really does is make you conscious of how different your ...”

“... have been spilled’), he told them that he ‘was going up on deck to see the fun’. Lucy Duff Gordon, a fashionable dress designer, whose life, together with that of her sister Elinor Glyn, is told in the second of these books, was on her way to New York with her husband, a Scotch baronet, and her secretary. She heard people running along the deck outside ...”

“... of the clergy in the 1630s and 1640s than to the Calvinist ethic as expressed in economic terms. Bruce Lenman’s book on the Jacobite risings sets out to show, not only that Scottish history is more than the study of a few dramatic episodes strongly coloured by royal personalities (the rule of Mary Queen of Scots, the Forty-Five), but also that the stream ...”

“... Lowe tells us, was never even begun? Many dons, of course, regard publication as incurably vulgar. Bruce McFarlane, a fellow of All Souls before becoming the history tutor at Magdalen, knew more about the late Middle Ages than anyone alive, but could not translate any of his knowledge into books. Sparrow might have liked to be such a man, but he wasn’t Lowe ...”

“... his writing self. One notes, in support of this, the prominence in the novels of heroes like Gordon Comstock who break with their stultifying families. And it is interesting, in the light of the works reviewed here, that Patricia Highsmith also seems to have been one of those who felt the need to rename herself before going on to make a name for herself ...”

“... I also miss the less eirenic command of ‘ALL WEAPONS!’ from Queen’s theme song for Flash Gordon (1980), which used to be a ‘familiar’ quotation in the Burrow family whenever my sons launched themselves at each other or their parents. Poor Freddie Mercury only warrants the quotation of ‘Nothing really matters’ from ‘Bohemian ...”

“... became the perfect public, the ideal reader – and respondent. In his all too brief Preface Bruce Redford is the first editor to give Hester Thrale her due, taking issue with the condescension of Chapman and others who have followed Boswell’s lead in disparaging her and trying to suppress her role in Johnson’s life and writings. Redford contends ...”

“... for Edinburgh University Student Publications and edited by the university’s student rector, Gordon Brown. Brown did not succumb to nationalism, of course, but he attempted to reformulate the Labour agenda to take account of Scotland’s national peculiarities. The Red Paper had an immediate impact on party politics. In 1976 one of Brown’s ...”

“... rather more contentious idea than Smail acknowledges. He uses the term, originally coined by Vere Gordon Childe in the 1930s, for the period between approximately ten thousand and five thousand years ago, when throughout most of the world mobile hunter-gatherer bands became sedentary farming communities, and from there rapidly moved on to found towns and in ...”

“... as proof of the Union’s benefit to Scotland – its chief architects, Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, both of them Scottish, were also the most prominent leaders of the campaign against independence six years later. The role of Paterson’s Bank of England – and the currency it controls – is today the greatest single weakness in the case for ...”

“... peers (in importance as well as in age) are separated without much rationale (Robert Smithson and Bruce Nauman are on the fourth floor, while Richard Serra and Gordon Matta-Clark are on the second). Although, to be fair, the selection is not permanent – it will change every year or so – it feels rather random. In ...”

“... he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that were blamed for – and that Hobsbawm later blamed ...”

“... interviewee in advance, though she planned her questions and their order meticulously.Lawley asked Gordon Brown whether he was gay, ‘or whether there’s some flaw in your personality that you haven’t made a relationship’. Brown could have taken umbrage, but instead said: ‘I’m not married because I’m not married.’ (A sign of the changing ...”