“... of unreason. Was Major perhaps similarly touched? He seemed not to be, but who could tell? The hunt was on for something non-grey in the grey man’s genealogy: a bad apple on the Major family tree, an errant gene, a skeleton in one of those long-ago suburban cupboards. And straightaway there seemed to be rich pickings. This nobody from nowhere turned out ...”

“... is liable to be dispelled. But when the stage is set correctly, the illusion can be very powerful. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair oversaw devastating electoral machines, which delivered four huge parliamentary majorities in the space of twenty years. Both appeared to establish a new consensus as to what constituted good leadership and policy. The fact that ...”

“... account of the Burgundian and French contexts in which Anne was raised to be a lady of the court. Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands, described Anne at the age of thirteen as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young age’. Margaret’s court was full of art and literature: she owned ...”

“... Q.D. Leavis, Carolyn Heilbrun and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have whole entries to themselves and Margaret Doody’s Aristotle Detective is singled out for honourable mention in the entry on Detective Fiction. Luce Irigaray is in, but not Cecil Woodham Smith. The biggest vacancy in the Companion is where contemporary best-selling fiction ought to be. The ...”

“... In 1819, aged 33, he surprised everyone by getting a job with the East India Company. Leigh Hunt wrote to Mary Shelley: ‘You have heard, of course, of Peacock’s appointment in the India House; we joke him upon his new Oriental grandeur, his Brahminical learning, and his inevitable tendencies to be one of the corrupt; upon which he seems to apprehend ...”

“... celebrations. The contribution of my former department to the general gaiety was to be a talk by Margaret Drabble, on the topic of young women at university in the 1960s and 1970s. I was dun gone, as we say in the trade, pensioned off, but reeled in for a last duty. ‘Or as warm-up woman,’ I said in the same breath as ‘I’d be delighted. I’ve read ...”

“... ring seals, but the ice hasn’t formed and the bears are starving. Ursus maritimus doesn’t hunt on land and normally fasts for months each summer. Now, however, the summers are growing longer across most of the Arctic, and the waters of Hudson Bay are ice-free for three weeks longer than they were thirty years ago. In a decade or two, polar bears ...”

“... of choice for most aspiring politicians. He was a member of an unfashionable college – Lady Margaret Hall – rather than one of the prestigious old foundations like Balliol or Christ Church, but through sheer ability and a good deal of networking, including the assiduous cultivation of Johnson, he managed to become president of the Oxford Union, the ...”

“... imagination the enemies are not people but the ‘Nazi beast’, a fierce wild animal he hopes to hunt and tame. He practices on a hedgehog, a toad, a cat and a young raven whom he imprisons in locked wooden crates in an unused cellar. Momik’s mini-menagerie, or mini-Belsen, is the first instance in the novel of what becomes known as LNIY, the ‘Little ...”

“... fine to avoid being ‘well whipped’. Marshfield was more fortunate than the quarrelsome midwife Margaret Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary Johnson, pregnant with an illegitimate child, who was condemned six months later, having confessed to ‘familiarity with the devil’. In the years following ...”

“... priorities on the part of public broadcasters and, according to some, strong pressure from Margaret Thatcher, who was determined to help Rupert Murdoch build up his television empire. Within a few years there was no live cricket left on terrestrial television. Numerous addicts, myself included, were forced to admit defeat, sign the document of ...”

“... 1934 of the NCCL was a barometric indication of the state of civil rights and the rule of law when Margaret Roberts was still a child. Yet it has taken the illiberal and unconstitutional conduct of her three governments to push a written constitution and a Bill of Rights to the head of the political agenda. The radical authoritarianism of the Eighties has ...”

“... life to come in the English countryside, her formal enrolment in the world of the squirearchy, the hunt-to-hunt, the point-to-point, the open garden scheme, the charity fête. During the war, the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had worn them to review the Girl Guides and launch messenger ...”

“... Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which offered everything from a flea circus to a waxworks display under one roof. Books had their place along ...”

“... at Risdon Cove, just north of present-day Hobart. The aborigines were probably on a kangaroo hunt, but the settlers suspected them of hostile intentions – they were barbarians after all – and fired on them, leaving several dead. The full circumstances are still unclear, including the number of Tasmanians killed – contemporary estimates ranged from ...”