“... to work the trick. A long time ago, this media ritual passed the point at which it could be called self-satirising, and became instead a ludicrous and embarrassing chore. The reading and viewing and listening public would not notice if this non-event went uncovered, and the media would be glad to be shot of the tedium of ‘covering’ it, but nobody quite ...”

“... terrible vision in On Trust for the Nation). The central character is a composite caricature (part Robert Maxwell, part Mohamed al-Fayed). The story is as old as the hills (love, betrayal, the search for happiness). The plot structure is both obvious and predictable (a three-parter, with the requisite climaxes and crises), the themes comforting and familiar ...”

“... with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in the media, had already rumbled the Wordsworths. ‘Wordsworth and his sister,’ he was later to observe ‘who pride themselves on having no selfishness, are of all ...”

“... of the it virtue. And he is also right in Chapter 12 when he argues that Jefferson’s concept of self-evident moral truths can most plausibly be construed as the adoption of certain positions of Thomas Reid. What he then proceeds to ignore is that if what Reid asserted and argued for is true, then Huleheson’s moral philosophy is false, and vice ...”

“... a spirit of one for all. Then younger members make their break, rebelling or deviating. The larger self of the family falls apart. Eventually, a point is reached where the youngest glimpses, as from Pisgah, the possibility of a fully individual life. Wild horses gallop, stars are apostrophised. It’s never a straightforward journey, these novels aver. The two ...”

“... is a woolly conceit, almost a faith. Proof isn’t required. A Brighton film of two years earlier, Robert Hamer’s delightfully sinister Pink String and Sealing Wax, set, to judge by the costumes, in the 1880s, does indeed have ‘Victorianism’ written all over it, as does Hamer’s subsequent Kind Hearts and Coronets. But neither of these is scrutinised by ...”

“... racism. Her father is a preacher in Memphis; Jack’s father is a preacher in Iowa: he is the Robert Boughton we’re introduced to in Gilead (2004), the first novel in the series, the broken-hearted apologist for his irredeemably wayward son. The fact that the characters live on either side of a racial divide is less important to their conversation in ...”

“... in glory, a being in human form but quasi-divine, not quite contiguous with the adult world. As Robert Rosenblum observes in his stimulating and characteristically original essay, The Romantic Child, Hodler’s celebration – like Gotch’s – lacks some of the raw and peculiar passion of the early Romantics. The children are still represented as ...”

“... under the Race Relations Act with inciting racial hatred. Leamington Spa at that time was home to Robert Relf, a leader of something called the ‘British Movement’, who had made a name for himself earlier in the 1970s by advertising his house for sale ‘to a white family only’. I don’t remember exactly what Relf’s involvement was in the case that I ...”

“... Sprinklings of pseudo-Hebrew here and there added to the mystique. When the former army chaplain Robert Bacon visited the ‘Shakers’ God’, John Robins, in London in around 1650, he found Robins sitting on a bed before his disciples speaking in tongues: ‘But the words he spake I did not understand, only they seemed to me to be a mixture of Latin, and ...”

“... would bully us into accepting that in morality and aesthetics ‘stoic’ and ‘Horatian’ are self-evidently words of ill omen. A helluva lot of people through the centuries have thought them very honourable words indeed, as Peter Makin certainly knows. There is a brazenness about the manoeuvre which in an odd way I find engaging, as it is in the young ...”

“... world of natural theology with a world which offered much more room for individual initiative and self-improvement – a materialistic world where the rules were set by nature rather than God. Thus during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831-32, the Tory geologist Charles Lyell conflated his uneasiness about the atheistic science to which he had been exposed in ...”

“... on the muzak and the mailing of America. It is no small relief, therefore, to be reminded by Robert Middlekauf, a leading historian of the American Enlightenment, that Franklin was in fact a complicated and charming man with the will heartily to dislike any number of people who stood in his way. People like William Penn, for example, the absentee ...”

“... night Harriet comes back from the dead Guy goes off to give his Egyptian students a lecture on self-determination. Why do we remain interested in this well-meaning insufferable prig and the girl who is soft enough to put up with him? Why do we remain fascinated by their ambience – the inessential auxiliaries of a semi-colonial regime? At the beginning of ...”

“... shells up to them at’ turns its quatrain round with an awkwardness to match any Dreadnought. ‘Self-censorshipped’ may deserve a momentary smile for its nautical pun, but leaning on it as a rhyme word for ‘tight-lipped’ stretches the joke to breaking point. Despite a few misplaced nuts and bolts, and even if the narrative sometimes chunters rather ...”