“... the 1980s) is wilfully disconcerting – and tasteless. It seems true (on the testimony of R. H. Hutton, writing a decade or so later) that Huxley invented the instantly ubiquitous term ‘agnostic’ (an ungrammatical compound, as the OED sniffily notes). But that he was the direct inspiration for Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant is highly ...”

“... There are 23 pieces from 1990 to 1998. Some deserve inclusion: Aung San Suu Kyi, Tony Benn, Will Hutton and Graham Harvey. It’s right to have a protest against the Gulf War but why five of them? (Oh. MacArthur edited Gulf War Despatches.) Then there are two pieces about foxes and two about Princess Diana. Is the odd hunting of a fox more important than the ...”

“... of Laurel, which were addressed to the various high-born ladies in the household of Sheriff Hutton Castle, this poet who rejoiced in his admiration of Chaucer and his academic title of poeta laureatus compares the women at various points, without apparent irony, to Cressida (unfaithful), Tomyris (bloodthirsty), Deianira (unwitting means of killing her ...”

“... represented his university against Northants. Harold Pinter, who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining ...”

“... matter that Potter, even as a naturalist, was prepared to leave unresolved. To her cousin Caroline Hutton, a convinced Darwinian, she would admit that ‘truth is truth’ but she preferred not to pursue the implications of such ideas and their unsettling consequences. On the religious side she was equally undogmatic: ‘What possible difference does it make ...”

“... significance of comet strikes on Earth’s development. In the 17th century, Descartes and James Hutton supported the idea of a steady-state system, or at least that the Earth goes through regular patterns of change such that its future state can be predicted, while others – such as Jean-André Deluc, who first introduced the term ...”

“... de la Bédoyère quotes as fact, is also now thought to be ‘thoroughly insecure’, as Ronald Hutton explained in Blood and Mistletoe (2009), a book that also reminds us not to believe all that classical historians wrote about druids.* And though de la Bédoyère is suitably cagey about the disappearance of IX Legion Hispana, he does like the idea that it ...”

“... Man in 2006. Robb ignores recent studies of the druids, the most important of which is Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe (2009). While Hutton is concerned chiefly with the druids in Britain, the primary sources are the same and his scholarly and balanced account of the history and the myths deserves at the very ...”

“... Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, but the Morte Darthur was written by Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers in the North Riding, not a thief, not a rapist, but the soldier sent to besiege Alnwick and Bamborough in 1462, and the man excluded from pardon six years later for supporting his near-neighbour, Sir Humphrey Neville, in Lancastrian ...”

“... Princess Diana as their apotheosis. Biographies of unhappy and tragic heiresses such as Barbara Hutton, from the Woolworth family, and Christina Onassis, have been huge popular hits. There are wealthy hapless males, too – John Paul Getty III, for example, or Hans Rausing – who never find contentment. And Hamlet can stand for all the privileged sons born ...”

“... point. At the height of the scandal over weapons of mass destruction in 2004, just after the Hutton Report had been published, Cora said to me that at last literary criticism was coming into its own. Everything hung on the slightest nuance and word, as though journalists had become linguists, poring over every possible meaning, and also archivists, as ...”

“... given an important stimulus by the urgings of Keynes’s iconoclastic friend, the economist Graham Hutton. The fact that the early Statesman had no fixed party abode may have helped its fortunes at least as much as it harmed them. At the start, the Webbs, Shaw, Sharp and most contributors held firmly to the view that the Parliamentary Labour Party had little ...”

“... the hedge and given an artist’s prospect of the countryside.28 August. T. Blair claims to the Hutton Inquiry that if the BBC had been right and the Iraq dossier had been ‘sexed up’ he would have resigned. This is presumably intended to pre-empt any calls for his resignation at the conclusion of the Inquiry, which, whether it reports so or not, has ...”

“... when they both worked in the City. (Heywood, who died in 2018, left the civil service after the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly’s death, but returned when Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007.) Cameron appointed Greensill, who had left Citigroup to start his own firm, as an adviser. He was given a desk in the Cabinet Office and a secure Number Ten ...”

“... that there is an apostolic link – however indirect – with Macaulay, Jeffrey, Lockhart, Lewes, Hutton, Stephen. When he reviews the academic can, with a little historical imagination, conceive himself as useful to civilisation in a way that he isn’t when merely adding unasked-for information to the store of human knowledge with his learned ...”