“... Babbage down to size. His candidate for the Presidency of the Royal Society, the great astronomer John Herschel, was defeated by the Duke of Sussex, whose main qualification was being the King’s brother. Technical education was left at the mercy of private patronage; Babbage failed to win a seat in the reformed Parliament; and Melbourne cut off funding for ...”

“... there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ and those of the essay (co-authored with Colin Matthew and John Kay) on the effects of the enlargement of the franchise after 1918 on the Labour Party’s share of the vote. If, as McKibbin believes but other historians and psephologists dispute, the enlargement of the electorate did significantly help the Labour ...”

“... Hamburg’s ruling Senate upheld a nightwatchman model of the state which had more affinities with John Bright’s Manchester than the Kaiser’s Berlin. And Pettenkoferian miasmatism was its medical equivalent: men and miasmas met in the marketplace of the environment. Prudent individuals who took precautions would probably survive. Evans is not suggesting ...”

“... and Chester Kallman, Graham Greene, Allen Tate, Louis MacNeiec, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times that may be upon us, and dreads God’s dreams ...”

“... the birth of mass culture as folk culture in the United States. Films produce stars at a distance, John Fiske has written, whereas television creates personalities. The glamour of stars sets them apart from and above their fans; the familiarity of personalities offers a more intimate, equal relationship. Well before television, on radio and in talking ...”

“... young man is working for the British Council in Blenheim Palace, and being gently patronised by John Betjeman. The sympathetic wicket wasn’t all that hard to find; indeed it might have been less yielding if the suppliant had been a lower-middle-class boy from Leeds. It must be said that some of the writing manages, by avoiding overemphasis, dimming the ...”

“... the only restrained beasts. Tam and Richie are always being ‘herded’ in and out of buildings; John Hall compares them to roaming wildebeest, and tells his brother to ‘take them to the pens ... That’s the best place for them.’ The Holocaust parallels, too, are laid on pretty thick. Donald describes the ‘permanent electric high-tensile fence’ as ...”

“... great, but you would be wrong, as the attendant quotation from Carlyle will show: ‘How long will John Bull allow this Jew to dance on his belly?’ MacCarthy had a great respect for Carlyle. George Orwell remarked that English anti-semitism might be regarded as a fairly harmless upper-class habit until 1933, but not after that. The essay on Disraeli, it ...”

“... part made the National Health Service possible, was less the inspiration of Aneurin Bevan than of John Hawton, his chief civil servant – the measure was not even part of the Labour Party’s programme. Even on an issue as close to the hearts and minds of the party leadership as the nationalisation of the mines, Pelling’s account emphasises muddle and ...”

“... Both poets, in their own inward and intractable way, are patriots – and hardly less so than John Betjeman. 1984 was rightly reckoned, in its newspaper obituaries, to have lived up to its name. It was another bad year, in which the world went on under its current cloud or curse. It was the year in which the Belgrano was salvaged from the bottom of the ...”

“... on the Bulgarian Antonov to bring him to trial as an accessory in the plot to assassinate Pope John-Paul II. Bitov claims that he did this job, found out that there was indeed plenty of material likely to incriminate Antonov, reported back to Moscow – and decided that since he now knew too much about Antonov and the anti-Pope plot for his own good, he ...”

“... to have been the fleeting ten thousand. Nor did he fail them. Bubbling with pride, he once told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the prostitutes he had known: ‘I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was ...”

“... Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham is one of the puzzles in Scottish literary history. Born in London in 1852, son of a Scottish laird of distinguished ancestry, he spent a considerable part of his youth on his estates, where he developed a strong affection for the Scottish landscape and Scottish traditions. His mother was half-Spanish and he learned Spanish as a child from his Spanish grandmother ...”

“... Bentham picked up the trail, following the footsteps, not of Lowth, but of an earlier bishop, John Wilkins, as well as those of Leibniz. That thinking could be influenced and twisted by language concerned Bentham’s contemporary Von Humboldt and an ‘academic’ line proceeds to the work of Sapir and Whorf in the first half of the 20th century. A more ...”

“... and a section of Ulysses about the paradoxes of love betrays, in a memorable phrase of Professor John Findlay, the rattle of machinery. He is also systematically infuriating, because his method in both books is to start questions and not to answer them; to throw out one or two good ideas, not to develop a thesis or sustain an argument for very long. He is ...”