“... for artistic purposes the great villain needs a worshipper, just as every Holmes must have his Watson, and so Bunny is born alongside Raffles, and with him that intense relationship ‘passing the love of women’, although modern readers have more often thought of Oscar and Bosie than David and Jonathan.And here the plot thickens, in Hornung’s life no ...”

“... Sir Eyre Coote, commander-in-chief of the East India Company armies, and Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, who ‘avenged’ the Black Hole of Calcutta and made a fortune there. The abbey is chockful of forgotten 18th-century soldiers and sailors waving flags and sabres, not a few of whom died in their beds.The first fancy non-royal memorials began to turn up ...”

“... Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of Tom Nairn and myself, but more wounding in effect. One of his charges was that Raymond had become half-absorbed, in manner and preoccupation, by the ruling-class academy. ‘Oh, the sunlit quadrangle, the clinking of glasses of port, the quiet converse of ...”

“... Prince Charles and Buckingham set off for Spain incognito (for about five minutes), as Jack and Tom Smith, to bring back the King of Spain’s daughter as Charles’s bride. Finally, there was his most expensive and perhaps most dangerous illusion, his belief that the more gold and titles he heaped on his favourites, the more they would love him, and the ...”

“... treatment of more radical and deviant players, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham and Tom Paine, is noticeably sharper and less evocative, and this points to the main limitation of his analysis. Any survey of such a crowded period of history has to be selective: but here selectivity and boisterous epigrams result, on occasions, in reducing ...”

“... can stand as the emblem of communication and intersubjectivity. Surely Holmes’s remarks to Watson are worth reams of ‘internal monologues’ recording the detective’s more private thoughts and fantasies? On the other hand, is not Fonty himself something like a biographical spy or literary Stasi, who shadows his own chosen target and longs to know ...”

“... residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving reviling speeches against Sir Baptist Hicks touching the building of the Sessions House’. A later writer describes it as ‘a shapeless brick lump containing a great warehouse in the centre for the court, and houses for the ...”

“... economy. He mingled with poets who dealt sugar-lumps laced with LSD. He met R.D. Laing, Lyall Watson and became involved with P.J. Proby’s management. He was, so he says, ‘trying to create an alternative society, like all the other arseholes.’ Which is why he was recruited by MI6. He was a natural. Hamilton McMillan (‘Mac’), an old Balliol ...”

“... Lee had expostulated, ‘it’s time the AEU told them to get out ...’ Crossman once asked Tom O’Brien, as Chairman of the TUC, why intellectuals of the Attlee generation were accepted by trade-union leaders, whereas the generation of Crossman and Foot was bitterly resented. The answer was brilliantly simple, and helps to explain also the changed ...”