“... vindication of the work. Meanwhile the Print Room of the British Museum under J.T. ‘Rainy Day’ Smith was run more on the lines of a dinner party than a modern archive. Friends, including the young Welby Pugin and old Colonel Phillips, who had been round the world with Captain Cook, were welcome to keep Smith company ...”

“... The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two senior ministers, Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton, who had to leave their posts at the Northern Ireland Office and the Department of Trade respectively. The paradox behind this extraordinary succession of resignations is that none of them has been for what traditional constitutional law ...”

“... gardening has been the fashion.There have been times, however, when London’s green tide was out. John Evelyn’s intentions in writing Sylva (‘A discourse of forest and the propagation of timber in his majesties dominions’), published in 1664, were practical. The book answered a request from the Commissioners of the Navy to the Royal Society for advice ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... another high-toned writer, I started journalistic life on the Express, initially the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was ...”

“... the numbers involved, a rank shift had occurred in certain hearts and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine ...”

“... Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though three names appear upon the title page, they have pooled their intellectual capital to a ...”

“... chip.’ Wilson had little to say about the pencil: what it achieved was too ephemeral. Nor did John Middleton Murry in his book called Pencillings, where despite his title, he left the pencil alone: instead, he included one chapter on ‘The Golden Pen’. It was left to Nabokov to produce an alternative view of the writer’s contribution to history from ...”

“... from time to time exhibit selected Screen Tests. The idea was already in the air. The neo-dadaist, John Cage-influenced Fluxus artists were already making similar perversely conceptual films. At least a year before Warhol began documenting faces for The 13 Most Beautiful Boys, the Icelandic political pop artist Erró, then based in New York, was at work on a ...”

“... to the ecological demands of commercial modernity. Even the economists cared about nature. Adam Smith was a theorist of what the economic historian E.A. Wrigley called an ‘advanced organic economy’, and so had to think about land. Such an economy relied entirely on the soil as a source of energy and raw materials. Production could be expanded only by ...”

“... fictional death was perhaps intended as a protective measure because neither her supposed father, John Pemberton, nor her real father was of much use to her. In the novel Peregrine, on being told of Sophia’s pregnancy, ‘put on a very sad face, then put his face in his hands, but he cheered quite soon and said, “Perhaps it will be born dead.”’Comyns ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... is tantalisingly omitted. The effect is reminiscent of what Orwell describes in 1984, when Winston Smith ventures into the proles’ sector to quiz an old man in a pub about what the past was really like, before the Revolution. All he gets is ‘a rubbish heap of details ... they remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a work-mate, a hunt for a ...”

“... included the king, the lobby’s influence was out of all proportion to its size. As Denis Mack Smith demonstrated long ago, it was the monarchy’s extensive prerogatives that made it possible for Italy to embark on colonial conquest with only partial parliamentary scrutiny. The colonial delusions of Umberto and his queen Margherita were shared by ...”

“... when we would like to know just how much inventing has been done. Did Philip Larkin really say of John Wain: ‘No advantage of birth or position or looks or talent – nothing, and look where he is now’? If I was John Wain, I would want to be sure of the exact words. According to Amis, Wain used to think of Larkin as a ...”