“... is still authentic magic. Memoirs and studies as good as these do indeed rehouse an age. Peter Alexander’s biography of Plomer is the most professional of these three books, but it suffers from doing its job exhaustively. Plomer needs doing in impressions, like the sketch of him as the novelist St Quentin in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, or ...”

“... the fancy of generations of historians. There was one notable exception among the scholars: Robert Tucker put a dashing young revolutionary – someone who might have stepped out of the Baader-Meinhof Group or the Weathermen – on the cover of Stalin as Revolutionary (1973). But the ‘grey blur’ remained, no doubt partly in reaction against ...”

“... men, courtiers, emperors, bores, Margaret Thatcher, fools, bad poets, frocks, personal enemies, Robert Walpole, reason, lust, excrement, travel, ex-soldiers, Americans, patrons, opera, religious orthodoxies, sexual deviants, shopkeepers, dildos, merchants, political parties and all self-deluded asses who believe themselves superior to the rest of ...”

“... poetry and drawing gave new impetus to Gabriel’s own work and was valuable later when he edited Alexander Gilchrist’s posthumously published Life of Blake. It also figures in Swinburne’s seminal critical essay on Blake, and William’s Aldine edition of 1874. The brotherly ten shillings had been indispensable. But it was Gabriel’s precocious ...”

“... referendum on independence in 2013 and instead moved to hold one in 2014, the 700th anniversary of Robert the Bruce’s victory over the English at the Battle of Bannockburn. Yet until Cameron’s intervention it wasn’t clear that Salmond was leading Scotland towards independence at all. While independence might have been a very long-term goal, he seemed ...”

“... Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that they seem removed from larger political conflicts, though they replay them in claustrophobic miniature. Edric’s imagination has always been drawn to the peripheral, to characters who are set apart, or seeking a geography to match their sense of spiritual exile ...”

“... himself, though Michael Brock, who was at school with him, provides some important details, and Robert O’Neill pays tribute to his labours in the Oxford History Faculty. A festschrift often consists of a somewhat miscellaneous collection of bits and pieces. On this occasion the editors have assembled a sequence of essays which coherently reflects the ...”

“... Both were sections of works of larger compass – History of Scotland from the Accession of Alexander III to the Union and History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1602-42 – but even so they were the first studies which relied on serious archival exploration. In 1956 the American Parliamentary historian ...”

“... general, waste good material on his correspondents. He was, he wrote to the Hungarian film-maker Robert Lazlo, ‘a bad letter-writer’. His replies were terse, polite and to the point. ‘I wish I could write you as interesting letters as you write to me, but nothing goes on outside my window except blue sea and mountains,’ he wrote to Skvorecky. His ...”

“... are recognised commonplaces of Classical and Neo-Classic satire. He says of a passage denouncing Alexander the Great as a conquering madman that ‘this seems to represent Boileau’s personal view, as it recurs in other works and is not a 17th-century commonplace’, although attacks on Alexander as a type of the folly ...”

“... and details of their occupations, taste and methods of buying. (Surprisingly, she omits Alexander Henderson, subsequently first Lord Faringdon, whose late Victorian collection is a rarity in having survived and being still visible to the public, at Buscot Park.) Some of these figures acquire a larger life in Macleod’s main text: ...”

“... to Montagu, this was no cause for alarm: the cost and ratio of raw footage to edited film for Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran were similar. Because the film had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein never had access to rushes; so he filmed more takes than he would have needed, just in case. Never having made a film before, the Sinclairs ...”

“... seemed probable: Conolly and Charles Stoddart were beheaded in the main square of Bukhara, and Alexander Burnes hacked to death outside his house in Kabul. These misfortunes discouraged further heroics, but did nothing to assuage British fears. In 1837, Iran tried to compensate for its losses to Russia in the north by strengthening its position to the ...”

“... in a tradition of Older Scots literature running from King James I’s Kingis Quair (c.1424) to Alexander Montgomerie’s ‘Cherrie and the Slae’ (1580s-90s). The English inheritance is in these works significantly recast. There is a refusal to focus on the pleasures of the love relationship or on the nature of love as Chaucer does in Troilus and ...”

“... ally? Paradoxically, this very inversion has led to unpredictable opposition. It was Congressman Robert Dornan of California, the classic Orange Country patriot and flag-waver, who said this week that ‘American boys don’t die for emirs.’ Those who harbour more general reservations are thrown back on irony. Not only did King Hussein seem like ‘one of ...”