“... to editors to take them on, along with their apologists, such as the (Scottish) commentator Hamilton Fyfe. His first victory was No. 6, Old Palace Yard, a stone-faced Georgian house behind Westminster Abbey, threatened by the George V Memorial Committee, who wanted to remove it to clear space for a statue of the late king. At the same time as fighting ...”

“... are blitzed. The letter can be found in One Family’s War, compiled by Christopher’s brother Patrick from the wartime correspondence of a large, affectionate, disputatious and very literate cousinage. Patrick began as a conscientious objector in the Medical Corps, but after winning a Military Medal for his heroism in ...”

“... Two days after becoming taoiseach in 1979, for example, Haughey approached the property developer Patrick Gallagher to ask for help in clearing his huge debt with Allied Irish Bank. Gallagher gave him £300,000 out of what he later testified was ‘a sense of duty’. Fianna Fáil politicians were not the only ones involved. In his testimony to the Mahon ...”

“... king of the métier Leo Castelli, he was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg that ‘Robert really had an eye for draughtsmanship. Very few dealers have.’ He also had a ...”

“... to draw it back into their domain. It’s a pity that this trawl misses the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who has long employed camouflage in works investigating Western pastoralism and the theme of death in arcadia. Instead, Blechman focuses on the French artist Alain Jacquet, who has used camouflage since the early 1960s, pulling it out of the ...”

“... universal consciousness from the diurnal torments of poverty, insecurity and mindless routine. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s landscapes of revolution, Edwin Morgan’s unabashed Modernism and internationalism, Sorley MacLean’s simultaneous fight for his language and for a humanist socialism. It’s not so much a matter of individual writers – and these are only ...”

“... are from the Woods and Bishop Story of the ‘Times’, which, though commissioned by Sir Denis Hamilton, is not an ‘official’ history. With such an apologia for the status quo, who needs one? And, in a way, one sees what they mean. As an organism, a collective entity, the Times today does seem a happier paper. Harry Evans endeavoured, as he keeps ...”

“... Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken place six months before, and the advent of the SNP had kicked Scottish politics into life. It was a talking rather than a dancing party, and the politics themselves seemed intoxicating enough. Around two we processed through the ...”

“... Red, Red Rose’. While Paterson’s non-bard is wee enough to fit in a matchbox, Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg offer a bard of Victorian amplitude. The Canongate Burns runs to over a thousand pages, many of them by Noble and Hogg. A lot less stylish, their introduction alone is almost as long as Paterson’s whole book. They feel duty-bound to remark on ...”

“... Roman remains, completed in 1573 for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, later acquired by the Duke of Hamilton, and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, observing that it ‘heralded an industry’ in palatial furniture that was still flourishing in the 19th century. By 1820 this industry was focused on luxury souvenirs in the form of round tabletops in which a ...”

“... but damming the Mississippi above St Louis, reviewing blueprints in Washington and renovating Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. Only during the US invasion of Mexico did he see combat, and even then, as a staff officer, his job was reconnaissance and gun positions. Lee remained aloof from the partisan fury of the Jacksonian era. But like most army engineers, he was ...”

“... of Rights to amend the constitution. The driving force at the meeting in New York was Alexander Hamilton. His draft bill declared that ‘the people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable’ (‘bulwarks of ...”

“... of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, Why Liberalism ...”

“... wonders what Carlyle might have had to say to Irena Knowlton, wife of a small shoe manufacturer in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Besides caring for three children, feeding boarders, doing the housework and garden work and keeping poultry, she stitched the uppers of ladies’ button boots, at home, for her husband. Mary Blewett in Men, Women and Work reports that ...”

“... to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s nothing much else. There’s always a bit of trouble at the pubs. That’s the way it is, round here. We’re really just a town in the middle of the countryside.’Then to Ayrshire. We got to Montgreenan House Hotel in ...”