“... if only because their celibacy is optional (though ‘there should be a biretta in the hall rather than a perambulator,’ one character says, perhaps loath to encourage interfering clergy wives).On the fringe of the fiction and outside the social pale are the nonconformists and evangelicals with their egalitarianism and tin-roofed chapels. Roman ...”

“... the SNP’s victory at Govan last November, but they have managed to include a final article by James Naughtie which takes account of that event. Throughout, the book gives prominence to Home Rule as an issue and to SNP successes as a problem for Labour. Michael Keating takes on the difficult job of explaining Labour’s advance in Scotland and Tory decline ...”

“... Fools’ War’. In his excellent introduction to this selection of Larkin’s letters home, James Booth quotes from its first page to demonstrate the nature of Larkin Senior’s political views: ‘Those who had visited Germany were much impressed by the good government and order of the country as by the cleanliness and good behaviour of the people ...”

“... The Relation Ship, was published by his own Goliard Press in 1967. Three illustrations by Barry Hall. ‘Off-set printed, then blind-embossed and hand-coloured by the artist’. Four hundred and fifty copies hard-bound. ‘Ivory-tinted Glastonbury antique-laid paper’. Hairy boards (like one of Sonny Bono’s Flintstone-style waistcoats) and a tissue ...”

“... stacks of white concrete bricks; next to them, a heap of rubble, all that remained of a sports hall deemed not worth restoring. Our job was to pick bricks out of the debris and make new stacks for future rebuilding projects. The young people laid out yoga mats and camping kit under the trees, a firepit was dug, pails of well water fetched, volunteers set ...”

“... as a musty mid-century artefact, an image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the ...”

“... and national media, but he was as dependent on graft and patronage as any old pol from Tammany Hall, for decades the home of the Democratic Party machine. Though he didn’t sup directly at the public trough, he had no scruples about ignoring or stretching the law to advance his agenda, creating no-show jobs for friends who could do him favours and no-bid ...”

“... couldn’t be sure, you could only surmise. But then surmising is the bedrock of the bawdy music-hall humour that the upper-middle-class mandarins at the BBC were trying to proscribe in the 1930s, and which the popular press has always claimed as its justification – providing traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and ...”

“... is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle ...”

“... and his fellow ‘Lunar Men’: the select club of Midlanders that included Joseph Priestley, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. But many of Wedgwood’s more radical ideals were in direct conflict with the needs of his business, which involved putting expensive, intricate ornamental vases on royal and aristocratic tables to stimulate emulative demand among ...”

“... Florine Stettheimer​ was a rich New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by squirrels and ferrets and showing a lot of leg ...”

“... Clay), the Godlike Daniel (Daniel Webster), the Great Commoner (Bryan), the Plumed Knight (James G. Blaine) and, most popular of them all, Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president (1829-37) was his war against the Bank of the United States, a private corporation chartered by Congress whose powers made it the ...”

“... seen by a mouse from its corner, and in 1898, going to Gladstone’s lying in state in Westminster Hall, he observes the ‘plain oak coffin’ and records an overheard remark: ‘Two carpenters in front of me said “a rough job – ¾ panels, & l½ framing”.’ It is hard to think of any other writer who would have foregrounded the workmen in quite that ...”

“... illusionistic feats that kept the magician-showmen Maskelyne and Cooke in business at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, for many years. Spiritualism also had affinities with Theosophy (and the ineffable Madame Blavatsky, into whose arcane orbit a handful of spiritualists wandered, only to be violently repelled). On the other hand, an outgrowth of early ...”

“... of age: in a recent election, Harry Brit, Milk’s successor as the gay representative at City Hall, was defeated by a woman candidate, Norma Polisario, because for the first time since Milk’s campaign in the Seventies the gay and lesbian communities had ceased to vote en bloc. Homosexuality there is returning to where it belongs in civil society – not ...”