“... From the 1820s, ‘Jacksonian democracy’ and ‘Jacksonian nationalism’, named after President Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, united the (white) South and West, and some newly arrived immigrants, in hostility to the North-East. A strong strain of ‘producerist’ ideology was linked to a bitter hostility to ‘parasitical’ elements of society ...”

“... stretched from Hardy through to Larkin and Hughes, and to Hughes’s successor as poet laureate, Andrew Motion, whose first critical book was a study of Thomas (though this genealogy had to overlook his Welsh ancestry, and the fact that it took an American’s urgings and practice to get him writing poetry at all). Longley grumbles about the ...”

“... rather have been with the losers: those hopeful young people I had photographed hours earlier in George Square, with their carry-outs and their misplaced confidence. Even in defeat, all the energy lay with them and their hopes for a progressive and outward-looking Scotland. Later, I set off on a tour of the unionist heartlands. It was a drab day, and the ...”

“... by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would embark on the joke. When he’d finished he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll give you back your day’ and ring off. The last joke he told me, only a week or two before his death, concerned a ...”

“... skin is a shade darker than midnight). According to Selvon’s friend, the Barbadian novelist George Lamming (who died last month), Selvon was ‘a master at the contracted phrase “niggergram”, meaning the circulation of rumour at top speed. There can hardly be another writer who has contributed in this way to the vocabulary of West Indian ...”

“... most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast and saw his ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... Democrats. In Haywire, his steely account of Britain’s backfiring start to the new millennium, Andrew Hindmoor suggests that Cameron’s announcement was intended as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and ...”

“... the genre in his ‘Epistle to Burlington’), but on another level Defoe is again thinking of Andrew Marvell: I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and ...”

“... problems in humans, and bizarre deformities in fish. Among those promoting the deregulation was Andrew Wheeler, for many years a lobbyist for Murray Energy, the US’s largest coal-mining company. He is now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In his first speech in his new position, Wheeler said: ‘I get frustrated with the media when ...”

“... first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to ...”

“... for the two or three days work a month that was involved. In due course he became Lord Lawson. George Younger had reportedly not formally disclosed that he was to leave his post as Secretary of State for Defence before it was announced that he was to join the Royal Bank of Scotland and Murray Johnston Trusts. Having been Mrs Thatcher’s staunchest ...”

“... the Green Room at San Quentin, the TV interviews – in which he looks like a wasted George Best carved out of rotten marzipan. Manson’s career proves, if nothing else, that satire has a strictly enforceable shelf-life. The high-risk conclusion to Watson’s epic is achieved when he comes face-to-face with the dying Zappa and his security ...”

“... Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which delighted his mother, and then, in 1935, to Canada. George V, who liked Buchan but saw appointing a commoner as a slippery slope, insisted on elevating him to the peerage. All the flummery meant that the new Lord Tweedsmuir had expensive obligations to fulfil, not always claimable on expenses, and as a ...”

“... he was adopted by a childless couple, Ernest and Christine Gove, and his name changed to Michael Andrew Gove. Gove’s adoptive parents came from a working-class background, rooted in the fishing industry in Aberdeen. By the late 1960s, his father had built up a small fish-processing business, but very early on Michael decided, as he told his father, that ...”