“... John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and power and character is at least 51 per cent image. In its worldly wisdom it resembles the first of its kind, John Gibson Lockhart’s pioneering five-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-8), though the drift of the two Lives is in opposite directions ...”

“... good Tory’ clearly meant different things to biographer and subject. Macmillan’s rival, Rab Butler, chose a biographer from outside his own party, but his and Anthony Howard’s political outlooks may have been closer to each other than Mr Horne’s and Macmillan’s ‘not very good’ Toryisms. After an undistinguished three years at Eton, a first in ...”

“... many Western governments; close relations with the foreign media; and a unique relationship with John Paul II, whose third Papal visit to his native country in June 1987 was the occasion for a sustained defence of human rights, and a plea for Solidarity’s legalisation. By the time the Round Table process began earlier this year, Walesa was a powerful ...”

“... Peacock is partly mocking Edmund Burke’s famous rhapsody over Marie Antoinette, as Marilyn Butler points out in her recent Peacock Displayed, but his heart is evidently with Anthelia. There is nonetheless some force to Mrs Pinmoney’s reply. What makes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue such an exciting book is the intensity with which he feels the ...”

“... romance.’ Elizabeth Gaskell in Mary Barton draws a similar lesson from the dangerous career of John Barton, Chartist and trade-unionist. Uneducated, lacking wisdom and judgment, his one clear feeling was hatred to the one class and keen sympathy with the other ... The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of ...”

“... champion of boxing in a place where people do nothing but wrestle. Or it’s like trying to get John Wayne or Clint Eastwood to look persuasive in Gone with the Wind. I’m not suggesting that Tarantino doesn’t know what he is doing, and he can certainly get jokes of this clashing kind to work for him. One of the film’s finest moments concerns the Texas ...”

“... passed to me some years ago during pre-dinner drinks at the judges’ lodgings in Lincoln by the butler, who had sensed that, though formally in charge, I was not to the manner born. I had the same sense of not quite belonging in the Plymouth lodgings last winter. The lodgings, a terraced dwelling of colossal proportions on the Hoe, was once Nancy Astor’s ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... promptly finished off by the Suez fiasco of 1956. The next decade witnessed efforts to prevent Rab Butler – variously chancellor of the exchequer, home secretary, foreign secretary, party chairman and deputy prime minister, but also a ‘man of Munich’, i.e. an appeaser, and, possibly worse, a non-Etonian intellectual – succeeding to the Tory ...”

“... victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.But ...”

“... of ordinariness diverts any readers from the prose of the early 19th-century labourer-poet John Clare, as rooted a resident of his native Helpston in Northamptonshire as Turner was of East Hoathly in Sussex. Clare was not so sustained a diarist as Turner, but he kept a Journal for a year in 1824-5, which Anne Tibble and Margaret Grainger give in their ...”

“... necessary. She and a one-time maid, Patty, and Tom – illegitimate son of the Rollestons’ last butler – are left at Carriglas, The place that was once magical for her. And then, flagged in reminiscent italics: Dunadry Rectory, September 14th, 1904. ‘It came from Carriglas, Sarah,’ Mamma said when first I asked about the china on the sideboard ...”

“... oppositions and identity politics. Feminist theorists including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber and Diana Fuss have called for more fluid work on questions of sexual difference which will address what Butler calls ‘gender trouble’. A number of recent studies focus on the radical potential of ...”

“... new biography does well to start by recording that, where one of his grandfathers had been a butler, one of his sons became an admiral. This was a family promotion that turned on his own hugely newsworthy command of a game which, as it grew in scope and formality, was found peculiarly expressive of the virtues of the Imperial power that had thought it ...”

“... looked like, to those who saw it anticipated all around them. Other essays in the first half (‘John Donne: “Farewell to Love”’ and ‘Jane Austen and the Business of Mothering’) aren’t about death but do explore authors’ writings to elicit patterns of feeling or of the want of feeling. Though none of this is explained in principle, some ...”