“... elite already getting fitted out for the jackets. If you had predicted back then the rise of Cameron or Johnson or Miliband or Balls, you would not have to be clairvoyant (all were would-be politicians who knew each other at Oxford), just remarkably gloomy about the lack of alternative routes to the top. One of the marks of a genuine oligarchy is that ...”

“... desired by Alex Salmond, but were forced in the two-option referendum permitted by David Cameron to choose between the stark alternatives of Union or independence.* In the latter stages of the campaign, as Devine warns his readers, he lent his name to the ‘Yes’ camp. But Devine is diffident about venturing into the political arena, and in his ...”

“... country, £7.45). The company is no doubt pleased to recognise itself in the image of what David Cameron described a year ago as ‘socially responsible’ capitalism, and its sales have bucked the recession – turnover and profits increased by 15 per cent in 2011. But using eco-friendly packaging and donating unused food to the homeless is one thing: Pret ...”

“... manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was Hollywood that defined those decades for people too young to know them. The American experience became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in ...”

“... fit very well. Julia Stephen herself had been much photographed by her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, usually looking distant and melancholy. In all the pictures of Julia taken during Woolf’s childhood (she died when Virginia was 13), she looks thin and stern and much older than she was. One shows her on the veranda of their house in Cornwall, staring ...”

“... Japanese cellist in transit in Panama; not quite Thrial, but still too much of an away fixture.) Cameron Colley is a journalist on a newspaper called the Caledonian that is so obviously the Scotsman (even down to the North Bridge office building) that one wonders why the author bothered with a pseudonym. Colley (like Banks) is a disciple of the ‘blessed St ...”

“... James Atlas’s The Great Pretender is a first novel. But Atlas has some prior fame as the author of a powerful biography of Delmore Schwartz, America’s poète maudit who died tragically unfulfilled in 1966, having lived out the truth of one of his best essays: ‘The Isolation of the Modern Poet’. The Great Pretender tells the story of a tyro versifier, who comes to artistic consciousness around 1966 in Chicago and who hilariously fails to attain any subsequent artistic fulfilment ...”

“... but with its own impulsion. Mrs Trilling turned upon Mailer T.S. Eliot’s praise of Henry James as having a mind so fine that no idea could violate it: ‘Of Mailer we can say that his novelist’s mind is peculiarly violable by idea, even by ideology.’ But the greatness of The Executioner’s Song is, surprisingly, in Mailer’s having manifested a ...”

“... examined. Even Chilcot seems to have underestimated the scale of the task. In 2012, he told David Cameron that the report was ‘likely to be more than a million words’ long; according to the most recent estimate, the word count is now ‘more than two million’. Still, Chilcot might have reported sooner had he not gone through ‘Maxwellisation’. This ...”

“... the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with him. Obama was so much more talented than anyone else around – so smart, so eloquent, so cool under pressure – that his teammates must have hoped he could do the same for them. Golf is ...”

“... a very enjoyable dinner in Oxford on the occasion of my 21st birthday. The guests included Norman Cameron and Tom Driberg, now both dead, and ‘Michael Innes’, still alive. We had dinner in a private room at the George restaurant, now also dead. Halfway through dinner the waiter asked to speaks to me in private. Then he said: ‘I am a respectable married ...”

“... It has long been accepted that neither the Union of Crowns of 1603, which saw the Scottish King James VI move south to London, nor the Treaty of Union of 1707 served to cancel out Scottish distinctiveness. In educational, ecclesiastical, intellectual and legal terms, and not only those, Scotland has always retained significant differences. Moreover, Great ...”

“... their educational and economic outcomes. This was the second such study; the first, led by James Douglas, followed nearly 14,000 individuals born in the first week of March 1946. By 1981 Butler was running the project with Mia Kellmer Pringle, an educational psychologist born in Vienna who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in the 1930s (Pearson ...”

“... was the scene of a ‘strange and recurring tragedy’ which provided the point of departure for James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough. The grove was guarded by a wary figure, a priest and a murderer, ever on his guard against an assailant who would try to murder him in order to take his place: ‘Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A ...”

“... power, and shrank from his legalistic bombardments. Erasmus’s ‘humane middle ground’, Euan Cameron writes in The European Reformation, ‘opposed alike to scholastic obscurities, vulgar superstitions, protestant dogmatics, and popular disorder, was steadily deserted by both sides’. On one of those sides was Sir Thomas More, cruel in ...”