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“... of many Loyalists, the referendum result is a vindication of their deeply sectarian worldview. Peter Geoghegan The​ relief was visceral. At home in Glasgow on referendum night, I had the jitters and went to bed early; but coming to at 4 a.m. I experienced a calm I hadn’t felt for several weeks. I sensed that the nationalists had lost. Total ...”

“... compatriots. In Rome, Catholic priests formed part of the British colony, the genial Scot Peter Grant being ‘an agreeable companion to everybody’ and the Jesuit John Thorpe acting as an agent for the purchase of works of art. Father Thorpe commissioned paintings and furnishings for the chapel of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, a unique surviving ...”

“... their educational and economic outcomes. This was the second such study; the first, led by James Douglas, followed nearly 14,000 individuals born in the first week of March 1946. By 1981 Butler was running the project with Mia Kellmer Pringle, an educational psychologist born in Vienna who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in the 1930s (Pearson ...”

“... the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was published around 1750 he was not ...”

“... As Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russias, lay dying in 1725, the future of the Imperial dynasty hung on his choice of successor. Peter, the first to take the title of emperor, had issued a law granting to himself the power to appoint whoever he liked as successor, but had continued to ponder the question, having had his own eldest son condemned and executed for serving as a rallying-point for opposition ...”

“... over, he says no. There is a fabled long version of Apocalypse Now – almost six hours – which Peter Cowie reports on in his lively and compendious The Apocalypse Now Book, from which I have taken many of the quotations in this piece, although I also learned a lot from Eleanor Coppola’s Notes (1979), and from Fax Bahr’s documentary Hearts of Darkness ...”

“... deal in depth with English linguistic history. For example, the collection of papers edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Language, Self and Society. This, you’d think (I thought), is just what is needed to excite a fresh interest in the history of English. Well, I thought wrong. The volume is too miscellaneous in topic and treatment to fulfil the ...”

“... pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition. They include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, the later Wittgenstein and the later Heidegger, all philosophers who ‘want to keep the space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause’. Bacon once called wonder ‘broken knowledge’ – a definition that suits Rorty’s ...”

“... of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an exploration of their outlook, and ...”

“... be a second-rate motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in alcohol and nicotine,’ James Bond tells himself about halfway through From Russia with Love, the fifth and perhaps the best of Ian Fleming’s thrillers. This sounds like good advice, but it does raise one large issue: what exactly counts as being ‘pickled’? Flying from London to ...”

“... these poems recall the ‘loco-descriptive’ poetry of mid-18th-century Britain, best known from James Thomson’s The Seasons. As Dr Johnson demonstrated, you can cut every other line from The Seasons without appreciable loss. The culprits in Doty, as in Thomson, are monotony of tone and monotony of structure. Doty favours meditative lyrics of a standard ...”

“... phone call clothed in amusement, This is what we paddled a neighbour’s dinghy out to scatter – Peter who grasped the buoy, I who held the box underwater, freeing all it contained. Past sunny, fluent surroundings that gruel of selfhood taking manlike shape for one last jeté on ghostly – wait, ah! – point into darkness vanished. The ‘eclipse’ of ...”

“... in 1924. It is a chrestomathy of essays, sketches and wisecracks rather along the lines of the Peter Altenberg scrapbooks popular in the German-speaking countries right through World War One. A Nice Night’s Entertainment would have been more digestible if it had been compiled in the same way, with a few more of Humphries’s adroit lyrics and some of the ...”

“... form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s ...”

“... John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must’). With Auden he went to bed; also, according ...”