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“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell article’, in which he criticised ‘a large part of the British Left’ for its opposition to the war in Iraq, described the Statesman as ‘a sort of upmarket version of the Daily Mirror’, and concluded that because ‘the NS believes that Blair and the US are the problem, not the solution,’ it was ‘time to recognise that Blairites like me should not appear regularly in its pages ...”

“... to go into now.’ Recent sleuthing has filled in some of the gaps. Nicholas Barker and John Collins’s A Sequel to ‘An Enquiry’ (1983) clarifies the role of Wise’s reluctant partner, Harry Buxton Forman. The forgers’ liaison is fleshed out further in the biographical The Two Forgers, which offers the fullest and most readable narrative to ...”

“... 19th centuries was also brisk. Some transformations teetered on the brink before falling back. John Thomas Smith’s 1680 plan of Whitehall Palace shows a confused warren of a building; only the ‘modern’ Banqueting House stands broad, thick-walled and symmetrical. This could have been the ‘before’ for a spectacular ‘after’, adumbrated by a view ...”

“... details of Grieve’s early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could ...”

“... dedicated to the memory of Samuel, is the most ambitious and informative. It is based on Kevin Morgan’s extensive Manchester project on British Communist biography, with its data on 4500 individuals, and on the work of an enthusiastic but by no means always unanimous group of researchers who have been active in this field in recent years. ...”

“... and ecological doctrines reappear in fantastic guise. In ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) Mary de Morgan mounts a conventional attack on the conventional Victorian miss; and Frances Browne ‘exposes’ standards of feminine beauty by creating in ‘The Story of Fairyfoot’ a kingdom where large feet are much admired. Hawthorne’s ‘Feathertop’ is in one ...”

“... and bypassing civil service rules on appointments. (Coincidentally, her husband, the Tory MP John Penrose, is Johnson’s official ‘anti-corruption champion’.) The National Institute for Health Protection is a very Johnsonian creation: combining NHS Test and Trace with Public Health England, it was designed by the management consulting firm McKinsey ...”

“... Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s. An authorial confidence informs us that it was originally conceived with more melodramatic action to it. The hero was to find himself stricken with a terminal disease and be forced to a climax of love and death. But instead, the novelist was ...”

“... to see home as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself ...”

“... The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life or to assimilate him into his own ...”

“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a ...”

“... Thee’ and much that France still offers. There are writers he likes, most of them dead: Ronsard, John Clare, William Barnes (‘love of whose poems seems to me a litmus paper of the genuine’), Auden (‘the greatest of my contemporaries’), George Herbert, Vaughan, Crabbe, Hopkins, Whitman, Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, ...”

“... which could be called ‘The Descent of Authors who write on the Descent of Man’. Ms Elaine Morgan is a fe-fi-fo-fuminist who writes books on the origin of the hu-person race. She is famous for her Descent of Woman. Here, in The Aquatic Ape, she takes rather seriously what I had always assumed to be one of these elaborate joke fantasies grown in Camford ...”

“... North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a subject of which Wilson knew little and practised less. De Quincey lived in or near Edinburgh for over ...”