“... Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick or Reynolds), their involvement supports Leo Damrosch’s claim that the Club brought together ...”

“... the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord Kim, on the other hand, might just about have served, given the fact that H. St John Philby got himself called everything from sahib to tuan all across the British Empire’s eastern division, and given the obsession of all these authors with the English ...”

“... they can’t be squared, they shall be squashed.’ His squaring was famous: Aitken became Lord Beaverbrook, Northcliffe was sent off on a mission to Washington. Squashing was the fate of, for example, the Daily Chronicle, which became improperly critical and in 1918 was bought over by Lloyd George henchmen. By 1918, as peace returned, the press and ...”

“... and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.’ It was Churchill who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had formed the Royal Naval Division, secured Brooke a place in it and sent it east, in the hope of helping Russia by taking Constantinople and opening up the Black Sea. In the weeks after Brooke’s death landings were finally made on the ...”

“... proprietorial arrogance and political manoeuvring became a legend. As Scott approached retirement, Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily Express ‘a paper of prejudice, not thought’. And the Berry brothers, up from Methyr Tydfil, were moving from Boxing magazine to the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph and to peerages as Lords Camrose and Kemsley. Fleet ...”

“... there is to say. Such might be the motto of the Beckett enthusiast. An ingenious recent article by James Hansford devotes almost twenty pages to a story whose original manuscript consists of a bare page of typescript,1 But the apparent-neglect of due critical economy is easily explained by the character of Beckett’s corpus of writings. To borrow the term ...”

“... and are proud to be just about decipherable in the blurred background of a majesty-mayoral-chain-lord-lieutenant-town-crier framed photo on a mantlepiece of honour in a spit and polish house just like all the houses of the house-proud little people they’ve ever seen. They know the scent of fresh paint, of just-crimped lawns, beeswax, Cardinal Red ...”

“... Swinburne, who proposed that Romeo was a satirical representation of the queen’s aged counsellor Lord Burghley, ‘the first and perhaps the strongest evidence’ being the ‘impossibility of discovering a single point of likeness’, for ‘this would naturally be the first precaution taken by a poor player who designed to attack an all-powerful ...”

“... followed by Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court in the 1860s and 1870s). Students such as James Africanus Horton of Sierra Leone, who graduated from Edinburgh University in 1859, exhibited both pro-British and pro-African sympathies. Horton ‘welcomed British civilisation and Christianity’, Adi writes, ‘especially for what were considered to be ...”

“... Surrounding them are figures more tenuously linked to Purbeck: Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, James Meade Falkner (who wrote Moonfleet), Gerald Brenan, John Stewart Collis, Fritz Schumacher, John Eliot Gardiner (son of Rolf) and via him Roger Norrington, Lord Hinchinbrooke, Jimmy Edwards, Kenneth Allsop, Tariq ...”

“... long poems since Auden and MacNeice were at their peak. It is not as long as either ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ or Autumn Journal but it has much of their verve and genial bravura. It embodies the quality to which it is dedicated. ‘In Praise of Gusto’ returns to some of the same subject-matter dealt with in earlier works, but this time it is all brought ...”

“... manual labour, and learning from peasant wisdom, he retained to the end many traits of the wilful lord. The importance he attached to avoiding fornication reflected his deep fascination with and perplexity over women, not to mention deep shame at his own sensuality.’ Tolstoy’s worldwide fame at his death is off the scale by which such things are normally ...”

“... but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin ...”

“... support of aristocratic admirers like Blanche Dugdale (A.J. Balfour’s niece) and Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian; and he was delighted to play Burke to Harold Macmillan’s Lord Rockingham. Namier affected to despise all ideological ‘isms’ and A.J.P. Taylor spoke of his having taken the mind out of history. Professor ...”

“... Party, two MI5 officers in particular had fallen under the spell of the imaginative CIA agent James Angleton. Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the ...”