“... never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in ...”

“... is the Wilcote chapel, a fan-vaulted two-bayed chantry of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich ...”

“... points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 June, 172 of them voted in favour of a no confidence motion in ...”

“... idea is being repeated, which brings out the change of tone in this verse.Madge is reading from William Empson’s first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which she refers to only as ‘the horrible ambiguity book’. Paton Walsh read English at Oxford in the 1950s, and Goldengrove is in many ways a response to the experience. Madge wants to be a ...”

“... Ask who the leading young British novelists are and you may well be told Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Julian Barnes. Given that writers typically have long careers and get better with age, ‘young’ is not entirely a misnomer applied here. Like politicians, novelists can be youthful long after the point at which the careers of athletes or ...”

“... of Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation.’ This is unfair on the likes of William Whewell, the 19th-century British philosopher who gave the name ‘palaetiological sciences’ to disciplines that seek to give explanations, cause by cause, for the changes that occur in the natural and social worlds over time. Whewell thought these ...”

“... stucco-fronted standards, high taste and low morals. In his ebullient vulgarity and lack of any broad social vision he could not have been more different from Schinkel. Sadly for posterity, however, Nash was out when Schinkel called; though Mrs Nash received him. ‘He lives like a prince,’ Schinkel noted, with some disapproval. He found Nash’s terraces ...”

“... understand why psychoanalysis in Britain should have achieved this preeminence. The story in its broad outlines is by now familiar. In 1926 Melanie Klein, bereft of intellectual support in Berlin after the death of Karl Abraham, accepted Ernest Jones’s invitation (mediated by Alix Strachey) and settled in London, where her ideas gained a sympathetic ...”

“... desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British élite’. William Pitt was an especially important symbol of this new élite: his well-known private virtue (‘prettygirlibus indifferentissimus’) made him for many the model of what a public servant should be, even if for others he seemed entirely contemptuous of the ...”

“... he is quick to catch what he calls its ‘ache, or regret, or conjecture’. He greatly admires William Morris. He is snappish when young (Dickens ‘has added nothing to our understanding of human character’), stealthy when old (‘What Mr Conrad’s left hand gives back ... is simply Mr Conrad himself’), but he is always severe, and demanding. He is ...”

“... became a central preoccupation of power politics in the later 16th century, in the generation of William the Silent and Coligny and Sir Philip Sidney – and of Sidney’s mentor Hubert Languet, a leading orchestrator of Protestant cooperation in Europe but an absentee from Prestwich’s book. In the early 17th century the same international concerns ...”

“... School; and that Sir Thomas Watson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock became Dean of St Paul’s near the close of the 17th century; there was a Portsmouth cricketer named Sherlock; of a certain Patrick Sherlock, another contemporary of Conan ...”

“... World War would have to be completely re-written now seem exaggerated, but there is a need for broad reappraisals to take account of what is known now about all kinds of intelligence and covert activities. Professor F.H. Hinsley and his colleagues are fulfilling this task meticulously and with clinical detachment in their official history of British ...”

“... are jokes scattered elsewhere about other 1790s works, including the ‘philosophical novels’ of William Godwin and his school. Nightmare Abbey’s isolated coastal setting draws on Godwin’s Mandeville (published in 1817, when Peacock probably read it with the Shelleys), a work caricatured in the novel as ‘Devilman, a novel’, all ‘Hatred – revenge ...”

“... and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster ...”