“... ambitious people keen to meet aristocrats there were also, as the much discussed ‘Princess Margaret set’ demonstrated, members of the upper classes happy to meet at least the more talented and glamorous members of the lower orders. Yet Thompson fills in this background to Lucan’s later life and its ultimate debacle with a clumsily broad brush. The ...”

“... material – for example, the strange meditation on the death of Wilson’s second wife Margaret Canby. She had died after a fall down some steps – after a party in California. Wilson describes in detail the long flight west (this was in 1932), the talk of the stewardess and his fellow passengers, the varying landscape, all as if he had a duty to ...”

“... nationalist (hence the pre-eminence, as cited sources, of Shakespeare, laureate of England, and Scott, laureate of the Union), and chauvinistically masculine. Jesperson’s luckless observation that ‘the English language seems positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it’ is ...”

“... since the fine detail is largely of concern only to scholars, photocopies would have done. The Margaret Cravens letters have biographical substance, for there has been a mystery about Pound’s relationship with her. She was a piano student and was thought to have been in love with Pound’s friend the pianist Walter Rummel. When she met Pound in 1910 she ...”

“... men and work came second’), and ‘my friend and discovery Selina – gorgeous, delicious Selina Scott’. The old boy seems always to have been unduly fascinated by sexual speculation. He finds it worthwhile to tell us that Jim Prior told him that one or two other members of the Cabinet had in turn told him that they had ‘tried unsuccessfully to get a leg ...”

“... silence. That was The Ice Age (1977), but there are very similar passages in The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble’s later novels are settled, capacious, Condition-of-England chronicles, prolonged ruminations on the way we live now. Echoes of the classic novelists are much in evidence. There is an abundance of lists of small facts and of local colour, and ...”

“... the female sex. The women poets could be rebuked for not writing enough about love, much as Walter Scott rebuked Jane Austen. Women are often accused of fuddling their minds with romantic love, but men seem very disconcerted if they find that romantic love is not on the female agenda. Lonsdale’s collection has very little ‘love poetry’ in the ...”

“... Mrs Bennet. Once again, other authors fail to match Austen’s remarkable diversity. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel ‘develops’ considerably more than other figures in her world, but less than 14 characters of Austen’s. Mostly, however, it is by comparing Austen characters with one another, often with another figure in the same novel, that Burrows ...”

“... is instructive. His evidence for the universality of expressions offended his teachers, especially Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson – cultural relativists who had seen eugenics in action and saw it as politically imperative to refuse it any scientific respectability. ‘The study of inborn differences,’ they said, ‘would have to wait upon less troubled ...”

“... Fraser’s book came out) as the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. The ballads collected by Walter Scott contain wonderful praise – together with much that is more wonderful – of reiver exploits, of their boldness. But Fraser is sharp with Scott’s worshipful view of his ancestors. ...”

“... summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations of the Scott Inquiry, and the evident surprise of ministers and officials alike that they should be accountable, in public, for what they have said and done. This malaise is not, of course, unique to our own time. It derives some of its potency from more long-term, in ...”

“... is the description of the ancient Scottish seat of the Roman Catholic earls of Glenallan in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary. The late Countess, ‘partly from a haughty contempt of the times in which she lived, partly from her sense of family pride’, had not permitted the interiors to be modernised. The ‘valuable collection of pictures’, which hung in ...”

“... It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed architects to ‘capricious eclecticism’. It is the hump on the back of the cripple rather than the pack carried by the pilgrim. From wanting the past, the argument proceeds to knowing the past, and since knowledge of the past is principally the ...”

“... and walks towards his welcoming host for the first of many carefully held handshakes. That, as Margaret MacMillan confirms, is more or less what took place at Beijing airport on Monday, 21 February 1972. It’s also the opening scene of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, premiered in Houston in 1987, and staged again at the London Coliseum over a few ...”

“... the memory of the golden-maned Boudicca of their upstream neighbour, Dartford. Dartford is where Margaret Thatcher, like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, launched her career as a big-stage, big-dollar performer. With age, Thatcher and Keith Richards relocated their original identities, with fat biographies boosted as pure legend, bad behaviour sanctified by ...”