“... did, it would only have been to see the interlocutor’s eyes glaze over in bored disbelief. As Robert LouisStevenson remarked in one of his letters home from Germany, in that situation you just find yourself gabbling on about clanship, tartans, Jacobites and whatever else will make the necessary effect. Silence ...”

“... detailed and sometimes not-so-detailed arguments have been sharply questioned by the historian Robert Anderson. Davie’s emphasis on the importance of Scottish philosophical writings (among which he includes MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The ...”

“... persisted even when Skelt’s, the biggest manufacturers, halved the price. It’s the title of Robert LouisStevenson’s essay in Memories and Portraits, in which he recalls his generation’s passion for toy theatres; the wait to save up for a new play and the agony of choosing just one from the stationer’s shop ...”

“... America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence (‘Primitive America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and Christopher Isherwood (‘Mystical America’). As ...”

“... alienation, Jekyll-and-Hyde style. But that doubleness is not Barker’s point. It wasn’t really Robert LouisStevenson’s either, perhaps – for poor old Jekyll speculates that the real horror he’s discovered is not that he is two, but that he is legion, many, the anonymous masses are living inside him. Ugh! This ...”

“... Sisters and defending lesbian fiction. Eliot isn’t a scintillating letter-writer like Keats or Stevenson, but sometimes readers are led back to the poetry from fresh angles – and not least from the ‘cousin of Colonel Heneage’ angle. It’s typical that he remembered Colonel Heneage’s name, because Eliot, so aware of his own family name and ...”

“... nor colleagues nor even Americans. A specially commissioned article by a professor of philosophy, Louis O. Mink, discusses Hexter’s theories of history – his most recent interest. Mink is polite but rather devastatingly unenthusiastic. His conclusion appears to be that what Hexter has said, in several volumes, is that good history is what good historians ...”

“... crop was tobacco. Then a French Huguenot called Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, son of an adviser to Louis XVI, began manufacturing gunpowder on the Brandywine River, north of Wilmington. His firm became the largest supplier of explosives to the Union during the Civil War and it now ranks fourth among US corporations as a generator of air pollution. Among its ...”

“... the traditional air ‘The Old Head of Dennis’, to which it was set by the Dublin composer John Stevenson. But the words too were responsible for the song’s great appeal: There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet; Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart, Ere the bloom of that valley shall ...”

“... young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to ...”