“... have lost the battle but we will win the war.’ Two messages from the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (who is married to Sturgeon), sent the day after Salmond was first charged, were leaked to the Westminster MP and former Holyrood justice secretary Kenny MacAskill, one of Salmond’s allies. In the first, Murrell appeared to call for pressure to be ...”

“... to fresh troubles – until the time came for a genocidal pacification, ordered by none other than James I, and Armstrong said his last good night. Nationality counted for very little, compared with family. Perpetually at feud among themselves, a community of predator victims straddled the frontier, as did a population of the defenceless: ‘The poor and those ...”

“... June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our idea of Edgar Allan Poe’. Armstrong’s Little Women is the most British and Pickwickian of the movie versions, set in a vague 19th-century ...”

“... of fiction that are outstandingly successful from a commercial point of view – Ken Follett and James Herbert, perhaps – or the most saccharine romance. Instead, it awards its prize to ‘the best novel in the opinion of the judges, published each year’. ‘Best’ is interpreted as ‘most distinguished literary performance’. The ulterior ...”

“... see: it was a physical struggle to unstick his eyelids. Thereafter he binged on the excesses of James Hadley Chase, the thrill technician guilty of No Orchids for Miss Blandish and the psychotic charms of Twelve Chinks and a Woman. Healy’s style, though it borrows the odd gestural shrug or swagger from twin-fisted romance, is his own. It is the ...”

“... already? Nothing on Carling was offered, or asked for by the fawning Bashir, and nothing on young James Gilbey of the ‘Squidgy’ tapes either. And she got a free pass on the manic telephone calls. I always wanted to know if it was true – as her male relatives went on telly to claim at the time – that she was a virgin when she got married. Nada on ...”

“... writers in this area whose achievement Dr Küng feels free to overlook: Robert M. Adams, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Terence Penelhum, Alvin Plantinga, James Ross and Richard Swinburne, for example, have all made contributions far too substantial to be thus ignored. Dr Küng’s enormous apparatus of bibliography ...”

“... anyway much like it here. No, let him live. But still, what do you do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and ...”

“... they are capital fun. And fun is very important to Chesterton, who would heartily have endorsed James Joyce’s in risu Veritas. ‘The stars are funny,’ we learn from an essay in All Things Considered, ‘because they give birth to life, and life gives birth to fun.’ If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking ...”

“... seldom in French or Italian. An opening chapter on ‘Tacitism, scepticism and reason of state’ (Peter Burke) takes us from a Humanist starting point through a scepticism that called for a rethinking of natural law and an awareness of ragione di stato which only a jus gentium could alleviate. In the next two chapters – ‘Grotius and Selden’ (Richard ...”

“... have struggled to turn a profit; many have ended up at one point or another in unscrupulous hands. Peter Cook’s venture, the Establishment, was taken over by gangsters in 1963; in 1972 John Aspinall sold the Clermont to Playboy as its main London casino. In 1976, George Marks, a jovial Canadian-American property developer with a silver Rolls-Royce, offered ...”

“... right enemies (and not find himself finessed so that he’s lined up with Sewell – or the late Peter Fuller) and stay out on the left flank; his fury is rather Victorian – Ruskin’s rage against the immoralism of the Baroque. Oddly enough, Matthew Collings – in the book of his Channel Four series – says many of the same things as Stallabrass; he ...”

“... of economics (thanks not just to Keynes’s early polemic but also to such historians as Peter Krüger, Gerald Feldman, Harold James and Niall Ferguson). The core of Mayer’s message was that the Russian Revolution was central to decision-making at Paris; that when the slogan bisogna fare come en Rusia was adopted ...”

“... and he was satisfied’ is how she describes a man with a prostitute. But readers admired the King James cadences: this was what great literature was supposed to sound like. Spurling, like some of Buck’s other biographers, charitably suggests that she first thought through her books in Chinese, translating as she went along; what sounds biblical is actually ...”

“... group and, after Rockingham’s death, its successor the Foxites – followers of Charles James Fox – who, with some success, tried to monopolise the Whig label. Their main opponents, the Pittites, who followed William Pitt the Younger, are often miscategorised as Tories, though they too described themselves as Whigs. The modern Conservative Party ...”