“... instead to a new ideal – one that would consume his fortune and destroy his reputation. James Clerk Maxwell’s four field equations, published in 1865, had unified electricity, magnetism and optics, and predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves moving through space at the speed of light. In 1886-87 the German physicist Heinrich Hertz ...”

“... 1940s – may begin by telling you the names of ‘the great English novelists’ (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad), but the opening chapter then takes us through the failings of those who came before them. Defoe ‘matters little as an influence’. Fielding existed to make Austen possible, but if you feel her ‘distinction’ you will also feel that ‘life ...”

“... a representative number of the magazine. Mount’s homage was accompanied by two tributes, from James Burnham and F.R. Buckley, to ‘our century’s most successful ruler’, Generalissimo Franco – ‘a giant who will be truly mourned by Spain’, giving ‘the lie to cant about “fascism” ’. At the start of the journal was an admiring interview ...”

“... his collateral descendant Oliver (also no slouch at creating ruins). Amid much that is familiar, James Clark’s absorbing and formidable study presents much that is refreshingly new, as might be expected after a lifetime of scholarly work on late medieval English monastic life. Clark corrects the common impression that monasteries in their last 150 years of ...”

“... for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would soon ditch his campaign and carry him off to jail. Instead, the irrepressible huckster proposed to take advantage of London’s recently introduced system of ‘red routes’ by establishing a ...”

“... I don’t say good reasons’). He looked back with particular nostalgia to his time as the Lord Northcliffe Professor at University College London in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So why did he then move to Cambridge? ‘Vanity, I expect; ignorance. Terrible mistake, obviously.’ He was an accomplished moaner, or mock-moaner, and his time as ...”

“... Odd Man Out, which was released in 1947. Bethnal Green masquerades as an expressionist Belfast. James Mason is an IRA gunman on the run. Twenty years later, his Hollywood career in decline, Mason returned once more to an East End of smoky pubs, dark shadows, charity hostels, to narrate a documentary version of Geoffrey Fletcher’s The London Nobody ...”

“... who make a profession of society; a perfectly instinctive snob. Knows everyone; lunches with Lord Lascelles; has taken the measure of it all exactly; nothing to say; proficient; surly; adept; an unattractive type, with all his talk of Lords and Ladies, his belief in great houses; something of a gorged look, which connoisseurs have; as if he had always ...”

“... his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that many students find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I ...”

“... about all this, but it was all part of the atmosphere. AH: Where was the office? FW: Just off St James’s, Park Place or something. Very pretty, a very old rickety building, with one lavatory, and a funny person who lived at the top. And then all the writs began arriving. Verschoyle wasn’t a shy man, but he couldn’t tell anybody. In some mysterious way ...”

“... meccano-work of literary theory. In conclave with her admiring if sceptical husband in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, Fanny Assingham remarks of her efforts on behalf of the Prince and Charlotte – efforts which involve, at the highest level, resources of query, speculation, understanding – that whatever happens it will all have been ‘great ...”

“... we should express no opinion on this issue, and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasise this instruction. Even as the latest in ‘smart’ technology grinds and punctures the Iraqi military, this amazingly explicit enticement to Saddam is still being debated. Did the United States intend ...”

“... Minister for Defence Procurement) as fodder for their own inspired gossip and intrigue. When Lord Young first threatened to become Secretary of State for Employment, Clark and Aitken leaked the story to the FT, thus hoping, to do the new Secretary down. When Young got the job nevertheless, Clark, needless to say, took to him at once When there was ...”

“... it might have been: Ned Sherrin on Caryl Brahms, for example, or Hugh Johnson on his publisher, James Mitchell: ‘The World Atlas of Wines,’ Johnson writes, ‘became the most discussed and most imitated reference book of the Seventies among rival publishers. By the end of the decade it had sold one million copies.’ It is also noticeable that ...”

“... perhaps in the acknowledged influence on him, at Glasgow University, of the lectures of the future Lord Kelvin, with their insistence, as Frazer put it, on ‘a conception of the physical universe as regulated by exact and absolutely unvarying laws of nature’. After Glasgow Frazer went on to Trinity, acquiring honours at each stage, and then read for the ...”