“... so much to the Americans). Even ‘poor old Notters’ (Alan Clark on the defence secretary John Nott) comes out of it quite well. This is a highly empathetic account of the British campaign, but Freedman doesn’t pretend otherwise. ‘It has expressly not been my task,’ he writes at the start of the second volume, ‘to highlight the failures of ...”

“... Layard, helped to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty of ‘serious scholarly attention’. As for the ‘full social and historical context’, that was ...”

“... first two epigraphs to the book are plain sentences from the American novelists Thomas McGuane and John O’Hara about how we judge ourselves and others. The third epigraph is a sentence from Hamlet: ‘From the table of my memory/I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records/All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past/That youth and observation copied ...”

“... when it deals with the world at large. The sentence in the chapter on the military budget, by John Blackaby, is surely a candidate for the saying of the year: ‘The Soviet Union is a long way away.’ To recommend, on the one hand, a systematic violation of the Treaty of Rome by an import surcharge, and, on the other, the permanent vetoing of ...”

“... The brevity of the visit inevitably led to mistakes. He has the famous policeman/runner John Akii-Bua returning from exile to greet the liberators, when he was in fact returning from Kenya (where he had been briefly held in the Kakamega camp for Amin’s men fleeing the liberators) after a running engagement in West Germany. He never defected. Mr ...”

“... Hull and Gertrude Atherton. She is wasting a lot of her time and too much of ours trying to be John O’Hara. At the slightest surge of congested blood between her primly pressed together thighs, all Mrs Krantz’s carefully garnered social detail gives way to eyes like twin dark stars, mouths like moist fruit and breasts quivering with indignation. There ...”

“... identity distinct from the British, the very fathers of the Republic themselves – Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson – conceived of themselves, at least up to 1776, as Englishmen who happened to live overseas. How could they have thought otherwise? From these pages there rises a weird yearning. Davie, in his modern self-exile, joins in his ...”

“... same may well have been true of the cities founded or developed by the Swedes in Russia. Was Sir John Hawkins a merchant or a buccaneer? Did his commerce bring benefits to West Africa? Finally, each of these books follows Sawyer’s lead in regarding Viking desecrations as more an unfortunate by-product than a deliberate purpose of their activities. We are ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”

“... who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented friend, John Mackintosh: he did not like talk of ‘alternative policies’ from the left of the party, but he knew and loved the party and would have stayed to fight within it had he lived. The party in Parliament elects Michael Foot leader as a political response to ...”

“... J.P. Gell was dispatched in 1839 to start up the interdenominational Christ’s College at Hobart; John Buckland followed in 1846 to be headmaster of the Hutchins School. In his uncertainties over employment Clough kept open the antipodean possibility, making an unsuccessful application for a chair of Classics at Sydney in 1851. J.A. Froude, after the ritual ...”

“... Opera or The School for Scandal from this reckoning. The tone is likewise snooty towards John Rich: we must hope that the fuller knowledge of Covent Garden practice which is beginning to emerge will permit less condescending treatment. It should be said that Nicoll is good, though brief, on Garrick as director, at a time when London companies ...”

“... very much from the male point of view (which has been stringently and definitively criticised in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing). For a woman, beauty must often be a more alienating and tainted gift than it appears to her admirers. Susan Sontag has complained that in our culture beauty, defined as ‘woman’s business’, has been made ‘the theatre of ...”

“... understatement intended to convey natural superiority … was modelled on the heroes of John Buchan: decent, anti-intellectual, self-deprecating and eternally stiff of upper lip’. Sometimes, the officer in Russia actually was one of Buchan’s or Rudyard Kipling’s heroes: Brigadier-General Ironside, earlier encountered by Buchan in Africa after ...”

“... at a few hours’ notice on family business and was resigning as treasurer. Nash and her husband, John, thought this was strange. They stopped by Hilldrop Crescent, but the windows were dark and no one answered the door. Why, the Martinettis asked Crippen, had Belle taken hardly any luggage with her, just one small basket? He said it was because she’d had ...”