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“... of Nations. It is the price of a useful and virtuous existence, of influence and undying fame. John Home’s History of the Rebellion of 1745 was not published until 1802, so Smith may not have seen it (though I bet he did). It contains an account of the meeting between Lochiel and Charles Edward at MacDonald of Boradale’s. Lochiel argued long and hard ...”

“... There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the ...”

“... Highgate.’ He adapts the tone and texture of other ex-spooks who ‘went over’: Ian Fleming, John le Carré. He admits that his dialogue is invented, all his East End villains are squeezed into one composite character, Mickey Williams. MI6 became nervous of the Marks connection in the wake of the Littlejohn affair, two brothers they had sponsored, going ...”

“... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...”

“... but Ellmann’s lacrimae rerum have smudged the wrong pages altogether. The dust-jacket of James Buchan’s latest novel informs us that Slide is about ‘agonising loss: loss of hope, loss of control, loss of will’. This intelligence came as something of a relief, because I would never have twigged while reading the book itself. ‘Loss’ seems too ...”

“... or tenant farmer, of the Mearns is the ‘essential Scot’. In this he differs from Scott and Buchan, who took the essential Scot to be the Border reiver. Similarly, Gibbon’s paganism distinguishes him from Barrie’s cosily Presbyterian Thrums, a town based on the neighbouring Kirriemuir. The Diffusionist thesis held that modern civilisation represents ...”

“... team of naturalists made sample collections and Parkinson and the other official artist, Alexander Buchan, diligently sketched. Buchan had been hired for the non-natural-history work, but it soon turned out that his recruitment had been a mistake. Subject to epileptic fits, his health was not up to the stresses of the voyage ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... laugh and the man we love to hate, and even the villain of the time-honoured attributes found in Buchan or Sapper or Ian Fleming. These last are by no means despised by Powell’s art, and in Henchman they take the well-known form of extreme loquacity. The main tactic and enjoyment of such a villain is to expound his plans for world conquest or whatever to a ...”

“... And that is what happened, though not before, in an act of frivolity that simply beggars belief, John Major, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, had taken sterling into the European exchange-rate system. By the summer of 1992, the German Discount Rate was at a historic peak of 8.75 per cent and Britain was in a recession of astonishing savagery. Sensing there ...”

“... shadowed by Charlie Chaplin, who seems to have been on everyone’s guest list. Lawrence knew John and Susan Buchan, country-house owners of the new weekending sort, and spent his time with them talking about ‘the Arabs … his muddled masochism and his … disillusion’; Baldwin appears at Warwick Castle and at ...”

“... autobiography which begins with an encounter in an Italian railway carriage almost worthy of Buchan himself. ‘A breathless young Englishman’ flops into the dining-car seat opposite the author and reveals himself as Oliver Myers, an Egyptologist with a genuine belief in the ghouls and djinns of the Arabian desert. Next we encounter, in the most casual ...”

“... by Edward I of England) were soon established as Robert de Brus, fifth lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, lord of Galloway. Both claims originated in the marriages of the daughters of David, earl of Huntingdon, the youngest grandson of David I of Scotland. Balliol had a claim by primogeniture, as the grandson of Earl David’s eldest ...”

“... impersonator. Indeed, Empson’s speculations about sex sometimes seem to owe more to Sapper or Buchan than they do to Freud. D.H. Lawrence is reproved for squeamishly supposing that Lady Ottoline’s cervix was sharp enough to lacerate him. ‘Now, if this had been physically true, any man capable of blowing his own nose and fond of the woman could have ...”

“... the story-book things are there.’ Similar scenes, evocative rather than detailed, abound in Buchan and Brett Young, in Waugh and Wodehouse: their country-house world was ‘mellow, dignified, creeper-clad and bathed in perpetual sunshine’. Significantly, this attitude prevailed at a time when, for the first long period in four centuries, few new ...”