“... but as home secretary he came into his own.One of Sidmouth’s spies, a man called John Castle, was on the action committee responsible for organising the huge and supposedly peaceful meeting of reformers on Spa Fields that was to be addressed by the mellifluous Orator Hunt. Castle tirelessly whipped up the labourers who had just been laid off ...”

“... that he had believed his client to be totally innocent all along. As my friend and former landlord John O’Sullivan used to be fond of saying (and him a Catholic and all, and editor of the National Review) if the Pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job. If he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be onto something. And Cochran brings me to ...”

“... press, in an early and faint-hearted version of mutinies against discretion still to come, asked John Bullishly why a foreign-born consort should assume precedence over a daughter of King George VI. But this was as nothing to the squalor and piety which marked the Year of Grace 1955. In August, Margaret turned 25 and tried to pick up the threads with ...”

“... art or of accident’? That formulation is C.S. Lewis’s; Ricks goes on to examine a paragraph of John Aubrey who, he says, ‘thrusts upon us a choice between apprehending his prose as genius or as ingenuousness’. It is not a choice I have felt myself forced to make. Aubrey is a remarkable and delightful writer; ‘felicity’ – Ricks’s word – there ...”

“... of the press organs in that difficult period, was supported from time to time by the Government. John Walter II, no longer having that support, switched into opposition in 1820 and supported Queen Caroline against George IV. Whether or not his motives were disinterested, his sales more than doubled. There is nothing like sexual scandal and public passion to ...”

“... and Washingtons, and all the other sages and heroes of [the American] revolution,’ said Sydney Smith in his ‘Who reads an American book?’ piece in the Edinburgh Review (1820), ‘were born and bred subjects of the King of England.’ The Tory Quarterly for January 1814, lamenting the victory in America of ‘democracy and Franklin’, had to admit that ...”

“... included Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sir Joseph Banks, Burney, Garrick, Sheridan, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In their role as self-appointed custodians of culture, literary clubs combined some of the functions of the Paris salon and the university the capital lacked. There was no true continental equivalent to the British obsession with the institution ...”

“... story ‘The Animal in the Synagogue’ with the words: ‘Look away, look away, look away.’ John Wray and Nathan Englander in English and Alejandro Zambra in Spanish all have a phrase about the impossibility of getting rid of the creature – and I’m guessing that Etgar Keret has something similar in Hebrew. That’s certainly what Kafka says, to ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”

“... later, my Durban state school, Northlands, had two old boys on opposing sides in a test: Robin Smith for England, Shaun Pollock for South Africa. The Coloured all-rounder Basil D’Oliveira came to prominence in 1958, when he led a ‘non-white’ tour to Kenya. Some of his achievements on that tour were staggering – 46 runs off one eight-ball over; 225 ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... the earth … I thought of nothing but pleasant gales and prosperous voyages.’ According to Adam Smith (who as an inhabitant of the great port of Glasgow must have had many opportunities for observation), ‘a tender mother, among the inferior ranks of people, is often afraid to send her son to school in a seaport town, lest the sight of the ships and the ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... have none of this. He wrote a four-page memorandum to the CIA Director, General Walter Bedell Smith, defending Philby. Philby, Angleton said, had been duped by Burgess and knew nothing of Burgess’s work for the Soviets. He urged the Director to wait; his friend would soon be cleared. A year later, Angleton was still defending him. He told a US foreign ...”

“... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of ...”