“... which is about his past. Here the terse humour, the work and the home life of Buchan fisherfolk and railwaymen are beautifully detailed, and by no means all smoothed by the amber varnish of an affectionately-remembered seedtime. The root of his radicalism is incarnate in the station clerk who shared a shack with a shunter which they called ...”

“... linked him between the wars with G.M. Young, Baldwin, Kipling, Arthur Bryant, Helen Waddell, John Buchan and Vaughan Williams, who together form a cultural unity which needs discussion. During the second war, the same qualities made his Social History (1944) as much an expression of the wartime thirst for other worlds as Brideshead Revisited or The Unquiet ...”

“... will betray that early imprint of adventure and empire yarns by G.A. Henty and C.S. Forester, John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, literature in which the world is ‘British’.I don’t remember what I read, just a mood, a pace. But I know writers don’t conceal their attitudes. And their glorying in the derring-do and brigandry are part and ...”

“... the remnants of an older order. Galt’s first memory was to do with the religious sect of Mrs Buchan, a local cult of spiritualists who broke from the Kirk and proclaimed knowledge of the New Jerusalem. They were hounded from the town, and a great procession followed them, howling and merrymaking, and jostling the Buchanites on their way. John Knox ...”

“... and Dom Perignon ... Peter Whitehead married Dido Goldsmith, daughter of Teddy and niece of Sir James. I was Peter’s best man. Bianca Jagger was Dido’s best lady’); the Thatcherite on-yer-bike business memoirs (lists of flights, airport hotel massages, exotic sunsets, cockerels’ balls for dinner); jollies out East with the dictator-friendly Lord ...”

“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

“... The choice inherent in the structure he describes can be expressed in the difference between John Buchan’s father and Buchan himself: smalltown stuffed-shirt or high-administrative panjandrum. Both very successful, of course, one cannily beneath nationality in the troublesome sense, and the other philosophically far above ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”