“... remarks, liked ‘to order hair shirts but did not wish to wear them’; Nelson ‘had not been a nice man’; Palmerston ‘like many compulsive womanisers … was in most social contexts a man’s man’, and so on. Hilton’s treatment of more radical and deviant players, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham and Tom Paine, is noticeably sharper and ...”

“... the evidence of the ‘federalising’ effect. Scotland is clearly drifting away from England, as David Runciman suggested in the last issue of the LRB, making it increasingly hard to speak confidently of ‘British’ politics. But it is not drifting towards independence. On the contrary, the main beneficiary of the drift is Labour, a devolutionist party ...”

“... of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and ...”

“... a man originally called Ryan, who inherited the name from someone called Cummerbund (it’s nice that the dynasty stretches back only as far as a slightly out of date item of clothing). The Rape of the Lock, a more delicate exercise in literary pastiche, has names that flitter rather than crash through literary boundaries. Pope gives his sylphs ...”

“... very much a character in his own right. The barmaid, Ella, loves him hopelessly, and he is always nice to her. What a cliché situation, and yet Hamilton makes the trio astonishingly individualised – seeing, for example, the natural refinement of Bob, and his old fondness for reading history books, through Ella’s hopelessly devoted gaze. There is no sense ...”

“... no need to question since for her there was now only one thing – Stephen.’ Even their dog David responds to Stephen’s masterful nature, seeing that ‘queer, intangible something about her that appealed to the canine manhood in him’. (But David is fickle: when a real man comes on the scene he finds Martin ‘a ...”

“... have four dozen, which I pack into my towel. A plenary line of Seamus Heaney’s about the singer David Hammond’s thatched cottage at Dooey comes to mind – ‘I say to myself Gweebarra.’ Then I think of these lines from another poem, ‘Oysters’: Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ...”

“... production schedule? But the BBC was quick to announce the younger, extraordinarily attractive David Tennant as his successor, with a glow, almost, of parental pride. Fine-boned and wriggly, somehow, like a silky dog, Tennant has a helpless quality, which lends him great adorability. ‘My girlfriend is besotted,’ leicesterbloke writes on the digitalspy ...”

“... got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I got released, I was going to get a vampire. A guy had done a drawing of Dracula, and it was going to be on my right arm over my vein. The mouth would be open over the vein, and then when I fixed I could say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed ...”

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David Foster Wallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels oddly proud, after all, of a penis that has ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”

“... they are still very much of the common people. Stagecoach was the director’s own project. David Selznick wouldn’t take it on as producer because he saw it as ‘just another Western’ with no big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and ...”

“... returning home from Japan, sits on a park bench beside a little boy and then, saying ‘No more Mr Nice Guy,’ steals the child’s crisps. If Walker’s were smart they would make a sequel in which Lineker, making off with the bag of crisps, is stopped in his tracks by Cantona who kicks him and makes him give the crisps back. Then the British Public would be ...”

“... public understanding of physical chemistry or thermodynamics or bio-informatics. It would be nice if there were more scientific literacy – just as it would be nice if more Britons and Americans knew a foreign language – but ignorance of evolution is not an indication of hostility to science, which remains ...”