“... accept that migration to the United States can make a Ukrainian an American, surely Windsor and St James can be considered to have Anglicised our monarchy once it had abandoned affection for ‘that despicable Electorate’. A more serious puzzle which he propounds is why it was easier for common nationality to become established in Indonesia than in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of letters of intimacy of any nature, except for some love-notes to the rather alarmed Brian James, the Australian actor White fell for in 1963. There are no letters to his mother Ruth and none to Manoly, who faithfully burnt them. There are early letters to lovers and ex-lovers, but so many doors are closed to us that our view of the novelist is only ...”

“... State by State, the original Constitution and subsequent Amendments? In some respects, as Lord Acton remarked, the Constitution was an effort to avoid settling basic questions. Its provisions were a series of compromises resulting from prolonged sessions of political bargaining, and many clauses did not completely fulfil the purposes of any of the ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl Jellicoe. I recall the outraged ...”

“... Trevelyan: ‘I think that, in the end, I shall go to Trevelyan’s enemies, Hilaire Belloc or Lord Acton, both Catholics, for an understanding of modern England.’ Belloc wrote no autobiography: he felt it was not really a gentlemanly thing to do; autobiographers usually offered too little or far too much. His now hackneyed and rather inferior quip ...”

“... were conducting what is now called ‘pre-emptive defence’. Almost the first question the future Lord Carver asked me when he came to visit my company was how I persuaded my riflemen that it was right for them to violate an international frontier. The ‘party line’, which came into play if we had a casualty across the border, was that we had been there ...”

“... could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore Cooper, for instance. Others he kept at a slight distance. Having done time with the notorious bore Hawthorne, he had the wit to remark: ‘Last night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said ...”

“... realism about perception that he shares with such of his ‘philosophical heroes’ as Dewey, James (W.; certainly not H.), Peirce, J.L. Austin, John McDowell, Husserl (with reservations) and, of course, Wittgenstein. Disappointingly, however, neither Putnam nor anybody else in his direct realist pantheon is prepared actually to offer an account of how ...”

“... Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name entered his head. The public first heard of Metroland in 1915, when the railway used it in a penny ...”

“... suchlike sorry political rhetoric). A grown-up reading of Samson a few years ago (the same King James Version that is offered at the beginning of Grossman’s translated essay) left me initially bewildered and remembering a large, blandly handsome boy of very little brain at school who, when I was 11, was my first boyfriend for about three weeks before he ...”

“... Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more he resorted to such analogies. Later commentators proved only ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...”

“... culture’s mantle of top poet, a position Lowell had held unchallenged since the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle and his subsequent Pulitzer in 1947. Hayden Carruth, born in 1921, who edited probably the finest – and certainly the most inclusive – anthology of modern American poetry in the last century, The Voice That Is Great within Us, wrote in ...”

“... order, inflation – because each is the tip of the iceberg of all the others, as Hall reported Lord Hailsham saying at the time. This is so because all these panics have a common panic hidden inside them: ‘the direct interpellation of the race issue’.Policing the Crisis isn’t just one of the best books written about Britain in the 1970s. It is ...”