“... centuries.’One of the first things the English learned from the Scots was central banking. William Paterson, a farmer’s son from Dumfriesshire, was instrumental in the establishment of the Bank of England in the 1690s, embodying the same ‘practical genius’ with which another Scot, John Law, established what would become the Bank of France in ...”

“... Immediately after the declaration of war in September 1939, my father, James MacGibbon, volunteered to join the Royal Fusiliers and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Openly a Communist, he was disobeying the Party line (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had decreed it a ‘capitalist war’), but James was not in any doubt ...”

“... which is notable for its lavish attention to the social and cultural life of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting ...”

“... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas ...”

“... in a London gallery, there’s more to it than a shared interest in contemporary art, as Henry James explains with just a faint smack of the lips. ‘It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the oddest ...”

“... Charles James Fox was early hailed as ‘the phenomenon of the age’: an Infant Phenomenon like his chief opponent and perfect foil, William Pitt, who, Fox’s mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan dissipation, already strong on him, did not distract him ...”

“... I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is ...”

“... Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret infatuation must feel when the boy she’s been mooning over asks her for a date.’ It was a compact beehive of brain industry and Podhoretz ...”

“... to him, as it did to many of his fellow countrymen. They had recently rid themselves of a monarch, James II, who had shown unmistakeable absolutist tendencies. For Defoe, the Revolution had been Glorious indeed. His opposition to the doctrine of divine right shaped all his political views. Jure Divino was designed to be a work to do justice to a lofty ...”

“... purposive, energetic-sounding verb ‘moved into’, is meaningless unless it is explained that William Golding’s The Paper Men was a late, and lame, novel of remarkable thinness by an old famous author about being a famous author. It was metafictional only in the way that reality TV is metatelevisual. Stevenson never reflects on a writer’s aesthetic ...”

“... I’m shattered by the impact of re-entry.) A news flash. In the latest by-election The Liberal William Pitt has won the seat. His personal appeal defies detection. At previous attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And Labour’s to abject ...”

“... to the widespread use of Blair’s Rhetoric in the United States. By the early 1760s, the Scotsman William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon ...”

“... In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s. They talk of the excitement of flying, and Faulkner drunkenly reminisces about his days as a pilot in France during the First World War ...”

“... of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, the clown suit has been deliberately put on. James begins, as Twain’s novel does, with Huck and Tom contemplating tying Jim to a tree while he sleeps, settling for hanging his hat on a high branch.Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was ...”

“... Illuminati?’ A further scare followed the disappearance in 1826 of the anti-Masonic campaigner William Morgan. Soon, America had its own Anti-Masonic political party, which held the very first Presidential nominating convention, when, in November 1831, it selected William Wirt of Maryland. Wirt won only one state as a ...”