“... community’ of Scotland only exist completely in song? Can it live by culture alone? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of the 1707 Union, quoted a famous saying: ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James Robertson loves this; he complains that ...”

“... or perhaps, in the first instance, prints and reproductions – seem to have attracted him from a young age. When, in the early 1870s, Frick applied for a loan from a Pittsburgh bank, the partner who authorised it noted in his report: ‘Maybe a little too enthusiastic about pictures but not enough to hurt; knows his business down to the ground; advise making ...”

“... Hae’ or ‘A Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel ...”

“... remain his academic home until his retirement, as its master, forty years later.Like many serious young people in the 1930s, Hill was appalled at what he saw as the failure of capitalism and the lurch towards fascism, finding in Marxism both a persuasive analysis of what was happening and a source of hope for a better world. In 1935 he spent six months in ...”

“... inflexibility and his unfamiliarity with conditions in the far north were serious handicaps.’ Andrew Lambert, in his new biography of Franklin, an attempt to reclaim the explorer from both Victorian hagiography and subsequent disparagement, is less even-handed: ‘Whatever else had been achieved, Franklin had demonstrated a rare talent for ...”

“... Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon ...”

“... demand, and price rises will cool. If it takes a recession to achieve all this, then so be it. Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, has refused to state things quite so bluntly (as Karen Ward of JPMorgan Chase, a member of Hunt’s economic advisory council, did recently when she told the BBC’s Today programme that the bank’s decision-makers ...”

“... Andrew Lang​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire ...”

“... other Republicans: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, George Santos of New York (already disgraced) and Andrew Clyde, a multi-millionaire gun dealer from Georgia who had made the news by distributing AR-15 lapel pins to his colleagues in Congress. (Moore, who missed the giveaway, tweeted: ‘Save a pin for me!’) The US has never had a ‘National Gun’, and ...”

“... as if his head had sprung an oil-can leak. He was nearly caught in a compromising position with a young actress pretending to be underage in the convoluted Borat Subsequent Moviefilm mockumentary. Then there was the shlock folly of the Four Seasons press conference held not at the regal Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, as was presumably intended, but at ...”

“... confirms that the neo-Victorian low-life, high-filth novel is doing well. To add to the buzz, Andrew Davies’s three-part adaptation of Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, has just been shown on TV. Waters’s tale of lesbian prostitution in the 1890s attracted publicity chiefly for the casting of Diana Rigg’s daughter, leather dildos and the ...”

“... ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout the party as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a ...”

“... stayed home to begin his career of drink and debt. She was seen. At first glance it seemed a very young and slender girl, dowdily dressed in black and wearing a small, close fitting black bonnet: she might have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat ...”

“... Insurgent Mexico, the most satisfactory experience of his life.) Or Fuentes could have chosen the young Raoul Walsh. Walsh was sent to Mexico in 1914 as a cameraman and as the actor cast to play the hero as a young man in D.W. Griffiths’s The Life of Francisco Villa. Walsh persuaded Villa to postpone his daily executions ...”

“... in its closing couplet: ‘I hate, from hate away she threw,/And saved my life saying not you.’ Andrew Gurr was the first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ...”