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“... the following morning.Short-term thinking also explains Cameron’s refusal to allow the civil service to prepare for a Leave victory, for fear it would look defeatist. After Theresa May replaced him as prime minister, it became clear that no one had any idea what to do, or even what could be done. ‘The British state had not done a shred of ...”

“... dates. The first plans for the cemetery were drawn up in 1920 and finalised two years later by Sir Robert Lorimer, an architect inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and Scottish baronial architecture – nostalgia to soothe the pain of modernity. Like most such cemeteries, it is overlooked by a Cross of Sacrifice – an elongated cross usually set on an ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... he was going to bed. Macleod, incensed, announced, ‘I’m going to shoot you!’ and drawing his service revolver, began blasting away at the lock on Dawtry’s bedroom door. Finally he charged the door down before collapsing in an inebriated heap. The long-suffering Dawtry picked him up and put him to bed. Next morning the two men had an icily correct ...”

“... both cheaper and often more effective than other methods. Its true sponsor is the National Health Service rather than the Arts Council, and it is only exceptionable when mistaken for poetry as a mode of communication with other people on matters of mutual consequence. One form of Noble Savagery – ‘O for a Life of Sensations rather than of ...”

“... political philosophy. It was, peculiarly, Wilt Chamberlain on whom the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick chose to hang his full-blown critique of the interventionist state. The argument runs as follows. Imagine a society of perfect distributive justice according to any model you happen to prefer, in which everyone possesses precisely what they ought to ...”

“... None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature – except Robert Aickmann (sic) who gets his name misspelled, and he is banished to the ghetto: ‘See ghost stories and horror’. Seabrook’s disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard, co-author of ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael ...”

“... MI5. Funds for upkeep and staff salaries were provided by Samuel Courtauld, who, with Lee and Sir Robert Witt, had recently founded the Courtauld Institute of Art. By 1935 it was clear that there was no realistic chance of a return to Hamburg in the foreseeable future. At this point Felix Warburg in New York began to press for the removal of the institute to ...”

“... are legendary, and often attributed to some character flaw, to paranoia or arrogance. Robert Dallek in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power situates their deceitfulness within a broader transformation of diplomacy, where the line that separated foreign and domestic policy, always unclear, was practically erased. Dallek’s book is ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”

“... House, survives. Burlington House was sold off to the government in the 1850s and modified by Robert Smirke, with what Pevsner called ‘high Victorian cruelty’, to house the Royal Academy. Charles Barry Jr and Robert Banks added the ranges that enclose the courtyard and house the Linnean, Geological and Astronomical ...”

“... combined exercise in Dada, minor betrayal and the care and feeding of the dreaded Internal Revenue Service, which likes tidy records of incidental expense. ‘Bernard went and got lost, talking to Susan Dey at the bar. He’s a would-be star-fucker. Susan Dey was emotional about the play and said she was protesting war now. I don’t know which ...”

“... we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – Robert Flaherty was ‘like an Irish Bishop who had turned gangster’ – but more often lets him flounder (‘She was a neat chick’, of a Czech actress of the Thirties), we can at least salute the book’s utter transparency and lack of guile about both ...”

“... ranks, he had enlisted under the compulsion of hunger and unemployment. He had never forgiven the Service the fact of its feeding him.’ The woman Garland loves, Thea Mayven, comes from the Mearns and could plausibly be taken to be a precursor of Chris Guthrie. Like Gibbon, she has mixed feelings about her origins: ‘In Scotland, in the little farm where ...”