“... of this propensity, not romantic self-indulgence or nostalgia standing in for nationhood. Since Walter Scott’s time the wound has been bandaged up in kitsch, of course. But the dressings have become so famously elaborate only because the cut went so deep. Will it ever be healed? Perhaps, but not in Britain. That is, not within the old British polity which ...”

“... Walter Benjamin was not a letter writer of the order of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity ...”

“... as a brilliant, transgressive genius went quiet. It appeared in bits and snatches in such works as George Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907), and maintained a fitful presence in the pulps and silent movies. As a result, Our Vampires, Ourselves moves briskly through the decades that separate Stoker’s novel from Browning’s film, coming back to life ...”

“... the troubled days of James I and is often appended to accounts of the capture and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh after his return from the Orinoco in 1618. More than three hundred years later in Germany, a related tale was told about a soldier returning home in the desperate days following defeat in World War Two. It is no coincidence that the play which most ...”

“... Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT by an Old Citizen’, Scott dubbed a principal ...”

“... and applied it in his fictional character descriptions. Sterne, on the other hand, arranged that Walter Shandy’s forthright declaration that ‘there are a thousand unnoticed openings ... which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul’ should degenerate into nonsense, and Fielding differentiated his honest characters, the naive and the ...”

“... his credentials as a mediator who could negotiate what he called (borrowing the phrase from Walter Lippmann, the energetic young editor of the New Republic) a ‘peace without victory’. Later, he would propose a much more unusual and high-minded plan for enduring peace – replacing militarist regimes with democracies – which liberal intellectuals ...”

“... very little on the allegation that he had conducted an injudicious love-affair with a boy called George Nathaniel Curzon, later to be Viceroy of India. Ian Anstruther in his new biography aims to set the record straight in this regard – although not, it may be said at once, at the expense of a full account of O.B.’s career as a teacher of near-genius and ...”

“... George Berkeley’s claim that things exist only when they are being perceived has a lot to do with his Irishness. There are Irish people nowadays who cross the street when they see a priest approaching; but Ireland has traditionally been an intensely religious nation, and much of its thought, right down to questions of epistemology or political economy, has been influenced by this ...”

“... William Macready, a close friend of Dickens’s. From this point on the names grow ever grander: Walter Savage Landor Dickens (after the poet, a friend), Francis Jeffrey Dickens (after the founder of the Edinburgh Review, another friend), Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens (after both the French artist and dandy and the English poet, both friends), Sydney ...”

“... The Wellesley Index originated in its founding editor Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957), a manual which was influential among students of the Sixties. Houghton’s book took as its starting-point the fact of a collective Victorian mentality – a kind of public overmind. Although this Victorian mind might contain oppositions within itself (the so-called ‘Victorian debate’), it was nevertheless governed by structures of thought which, if not consensual, were in the largest sense rational and intellectual – a set of ideas articulated by a clerisy ...”

“... While writing World of Secrets, Walter Laqueur had discussions with the present and all surviving past directors of the Central Intelligence Agency save one, as well as with other senior Intelligence official and their main customers. Such goings-on would be unthinkable, or at the very least unavowable, in Britain ...”

“... which combined to form ... an intricate pattern of paranoia and suspicion’. He had to accept Walter Lippmann’s dictum. All that the historian ‘can really do’, this states, ‘is to write the history of the exposure of political corruption, in other words to describe and analyse political scandal’. The result makes splendid reading. The detail is ...”

“... In his essay on Nikolai Leskov, Walter Benjamin observes, almost in passing, that the novel inevitably brings about the end or storytelling. Like many of Benjamin’s paradoxes, this insight is very unsettling to the received idea – oh dear no, the novel doesn’t tell a story after all. Benjamin’s reasoning runs thus: the story (the only current example would be the dirty joke, I imagine) has no identifiable single author and is transmitted face to face ...”

“... to bolster his own derogatory views of his contemporaries. They trade unflattering estimations of George Curzon and Hall Caine, among others, Wilde showing implausible enthusiasm in his agreement with Harris’s bitching. Stephen Fry was cast in Wilde long before Mitchell had written the script and everyone from Chris Evans to Merlin Holland agreed that he ...”