“... between Scottish identity and the left isn’t new. In 1924, the Independent Labour Party MP James Maxton spoke of turning ‘the English-ridden, capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly ...”

“... his long and loving friendship with the self-thwarting Esther Murphy in The Fifties (1986), Edmund Wilson recalled how vividly, if also profligately, Murphy – whose particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer’s block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration – embodied ‘the special characteristics of our race of the 1920s: habit of ...”

“... and adventure. For years, in fact, he was thought of as a children’s writer. Henry James, an admirer of Kipling, complained: In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have quite given that up in proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in subject to the more simple – from the ...”

“... that only a myth of shared ground will allow us to find whatever ground we share. The work of James Agee, Hannah Arendt, Fred Dupee, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson – these are some of the names Mrs Trilling mentions – gave the myth one of the best runs it has had ...”

“... success.’ In 1919, the two most important architects of the Versailles peace settlement, Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George, both acknowledged Mazzini’s inspiration. According to Lloyd George, ‘the map of Europe as we see it today is the map of Joseph Mazzini. He was the prophet of free nationality ... He taught us not merely the rights of a nation; he ...”

“... of all three of the Sitwell siblings in Yourcenar’s memoirs, also perhaps a touch of M.R. James: there is always something eerie about her evocation of past facts and probabilities. Her narrative reads like the sober preamble to an unsettling ghost story, a sceptical intelligence pressing on with reasoned discourse, while half-aware of flickering ...”

“... as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of 1912 proposed to renew entrepreneurial opportunities through anti-trust and regulatory policies. He recalls a certain kind of populist progressive: distrustful of big business but also of big government, except as a regulator ...”

“... shouldn’t have been any left. But of course there were, and are, plenty of them. The late Bryan Wilson, a taxonomist of sects, was reduced to inventing a special category for the Quakers, a sect which should have turned into a denomination but obstinately refused to do so. Endogamy had something to do with that. Among my many Quaker relations I recall a ...”

“... his advocacy of mostly British architecture, from the Brutalist buildings of the Smithsons and James Stirling, through the Pop designs of Archigram and Cedric Price, to the high-tech megastructures of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, so providing a critical genealogy for these postwar architects as well. Despite his smooth narrative, Whiteley does not paper ...”

“... His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the caricature that popular history has handed down. He writes effectively about the ins and outs of economic policy, charting the complex conflicts between One Nation Toryism and incipient neoliberalism during the Macmillan administration, and ...”

“... published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... to ‘behaviour’ and strong on obedience. Proprietary dog-food, appealingly humanised – James Spratt’s ‘Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes’, for example – was added to the household’s grocery-list. No longer just a man’s best friend or a lady’s toy, the dog was a member of the family. And if dogs were the children who never grew up, they also ...”

“... gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use of coke for iron smelting in 1709, James Watt’s invention of the external-condenser steam engine in 1765, and the sinking of the first oil well by Elmer Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 – all of them, we might note, English-speaking businessmen. The three significant fossil fuels ...”

“... brackish and personal way, elements of the classical tradition (their Economist Building in St James’s was a well-crafted, contextual work for an establishment client), it was all over for Banham – it was a betrayal, after which he went to look elsewhere for his architecture autre. The nearest​ that any of the Brutalist revival volumes published in ...”

“... two incongruous neighbours: A.E. Housman, anchored by misanthropy to this out-of-the-way spot, and James Klugmann, the chief Communist student organiser, and later a life-long Party worker. I.2 was not an ideal residence. When a gust of wind blew, the small fire, over which toast could be made with the help of a long fork and much patience, threw out billowing ...”