“... too rollicking either. In his preface to the new Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Ritchie Robertson says the novels ‘were often understood with dutiful awe as intellectual fiction of a high order, top-heavy with German philosophy and history’, and continues: ‘Over-attention to this aspect of Mann’s fiction often distracted readers, especially ...”

“... a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one of the least ...”

“... and paid less attent-ion to those Scottish Labour politicians, such as Donald Dewar and George Robertson, who anticipated that devolution would settle the Scottish Question, and conveniently kill off the nationalist threat to Labour’s Scottish stronghold. It was unseemly, however, to express such sentiments in the raw. Home Rule was a momentous ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... they were ‘rendered ideological by the critical discourse of the period’, that’s to say, by John Berger’s insistence that they were ‘engaged’ whether they liked it or not. Their drab everyday subjects and their exaggerated reprise of the Camden Town Group’s brand of murky domestic realism lent plausibility to Berger’s ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his pitiably meagre possessions; in the process ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s version in the 1760s, he made it even ...”

“... England’ received the very epitome of grave, tasteful and well-regarded biography. John Gore chronicled the inner man, his tastes, hobbies and friendships; and Harold Nicolson described his public life and times. Nicolson’s book in particular did as much to confirm George’s reputation as a good king as it did to confirm his own reputation ...”

“... less flamboyantly, at Trinity were Winstanley, Gow, Broad, Lapsley and at a later date Dennis Robertson and the egregious Simpson. Secateurs in hand, they moved in summer from snipping off the buds in the gardens in the morning to contemplating the lads in the town bathing place in the afternoon. This interest in good looks was hardly surprising. From the ...”

“... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...”

“... the death – in August 1910, a few weeks after the fatal heart attack of his youngest brother, Robertson – of his ‘ideal Elder brother’, William. William died at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire with Henry at his bedside. Only a week earlier Henry had arrived from England with William and his wife, Alice, along with their son Henry ...”

“... shoes, confident and solicitous and ultimately shallow, like some CIA operative (played by Cliff Robertson) in an old conspiracy movie. I don’t know what kind of woman Karen imagined as her rescuer – but I know she imagined someone and she knew that, if this someone didn’t come soon, she would never escape. An hour or so after Annie’s serenade, I was ...”

“... anchorite St Alphege, who in Rees-Mogg’s exegesis was England’s first tax martyr; and John Locke, whom he characterised with cynical vagueness as a champion of the people against government. That speech set the key for his parliamentary excursions into history and literature, armed with the kind of cute patriotic simpleness one might have found in ...”

“... that it wasn’t true, since I contributed a piece to the anthology Mortification, edited by Robin Robertson, about writers’ public embarrassments. I agreed to contribute before the book found its publisher, which turned out to be Fourth Estate, prop. R. Murdoch. Oops. I suspect I’m not the only person to have been caught out, since another contributor was ...”