“... of them rather whiskered but both of them rather well-made. He summarises the style of his guru Michael Oakeshott, who he met as a brother officer in the course of a fairly undemanding war. Worsthorne seems to have intuited all or most of Oakeshott’s elegant resignation about politics and action from his view (derived allegedly from the Iron Duke) that ...”

“... heart was in it. In his entertaining colonial service autobiography A Mole in the Crown, Michael Carritt describes working under Anderson when he became Governor of Bengal in the mid-1930s. He had been sent to Bengal as a strongman, a trouble-shooter, to cope with a quick succession of terrorist assassinations and an increase in Indian nationalist ...”

“... of ‘clerico-fascist’ vipers. (One member of Cowling’s Peterhouse caucus was said to sport a black armband on the anniversary of Franco’s death.) For much of the 1980s Cowling and Trevor-Roper would engage in a ‘long-running and increasingly public slanging-match’, which, as Jonathan Parry notes in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British ...”

“... Tennessee, founded by her friend, Fanny Wright. What Wright had in mind was a commune in which black and white children would be educated together in a Temple of Science. The Nashoba community also advocated the practice of free or ‘rational’ love. Mrs Trollope’s views on this and other aspects of the Nashoba programme, and the degree of her ...”

“... of a new round of ‘affirmative action’ in sectors of the economy designed to accommodate black South Africans. Be that as it may, Coetzee’s father’s loss of his job, the family’s subsequent move to Worcester, about a hundred miles north of Cape Town, along with the parents’ decision to have the boy educated in English, the language of the ...”

“... of randomness, as at the end of La Grande Illusion, when the two French soldiers, dressed in black, are trudging up a snow-covered mountain, their awkward movements apparently choreographed in a kind of counterpoint? Or is it in the spaces he leaves for us to fill in, what Truffaut calls ‘un travail semi-improvisé, volontairement ...”

“... in the holes with speculation and gossip. She ‘hears’ that the Duchess is said to have turned black as a prune. It was always ‘said’ that the Duchess picked up her most exciting sexual skills while travelling in the Orient. These snippets she blithely records as if her duty as journalist did not extend beyond reproducing hearsay. About Maître ...”

“... I went to see London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert at the Oxford Apollo and one of Michael Clark’s earliest forays at the Museum of Modern Art, barebottomed in Bodymap and long sleeves. There wasn’t much more than that going on in London but they did get Merce Cunningham at Sadler’s Wells every now and again, and that was a revelation. I ...”

“... of Beowulf in the late 1940s; it was first published in 1952. Recent versions by Seamus Heaney and Michael Alexander might have made the need for the republication of Morgan’s less urgent for anyone who just wants to get hold of a good modern Beowulf, but as an early and defining Morgan poem it remains indispensable. First of all, the poem is a ...”

“... food if we drop tariffs on agricultural imports from Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as Michael Gove wants to do, and it gets even better. Just not for farmers. The spectre haunting the British farmyard is that the EU debate will turn public attention to what’s happening down on the farm, whatever the referendum result. There is, after ...”

“... musicians. There were talented singers in his social circle, notably the opera singer Johann Michael Vogl, but Schubert would often sing and play his songs himself. He had a nice voice and was a good pianist, but one wonders what these renditions must have sounded like. The technical demands of the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise were ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open ...”

“... are Iraq and Iran, both sources of uncertainty and threat. What strategies are available, Paul Michael Brannagan and Danyel Reiche ask in their useful overview of the politics of the 2022 World Cup, to such a small and vulnerable state when it attempts to achieve some measure of security and influence? Acquiring powerful allies and a military overlord is a ...”

“... come up with the names of Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, Geoffrey Hill, Robert M. Adams, Michael Foot, Norman Brown, J. Middleton Murry, George Orwell, André Breton, F.R. Leavis. Said’s overlooking of most (not all) of these might strike you as a shade provincial, but they aren’t much to his point, since what he really means is ‘the major ...”

“... copies across the border instead of his usual smuggled butter. We might have called it the Black North, for being dark with Protestants, but when I was a child in the 1960s, Ulster was the place British sweets came from: Spangles, Buttons and, most notably, Opal Fruits. It was across this border that the feminists of ‘the condom train’ staged a ...”