“... the wrong way. This is the right way’) created a British idea of motherliness; while the Hymns may have been even more influential. They were extraordinarily popular, repeatedly reprinted in Britain over the next 120 years. Their message is sunny and upbeat, a kind of nursery Priestleianism, resolutely looking on ‘the bright side of every thing’, and ...”

“... declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude.’ He leans towards the ‘fundamentally nice’ view. But the niceness was not apparent to many people, who had to judge Trevor-Roper by what and how he wrote. The prose style he adopted ...”

“... the way to interpret a foreign culture sympathetically. But however much Mead and Benedict may have desired to ‘make the world safe for differences’, their ideas also contributed to the consolidation of US hegemony in the postwar years. To see how​ this happened, it’s helpful to return to some of the assumptions behind the Culture and ...”

“... difference; but it didn’t happen. Older voters tended to be the most staunchly Unionist: time may not be on the Union’s side. As yet, despite the Westminster party leaders’ widely publicised referendum ‘vow’, it’s not clear what will emerge. We may get a flavour of devo-max, the option Daveheart was determined ...”

“... down, and accordingly tend to be received as magisterial masterpieces, although their conclusions may be utterly different from one another. The question is never laid to rest. The hunt goes on for the smoking gun, the killer fact (these often deployed metaphors being the worst possible in the circumstances). Margot Asquith kept a diary for 47 years, off and ...”

“... It is likely that not willing is not a practicable state of mind; not to want to do something may be in the long run a mental content impossible to subsist on. Between not willing a certain thing and not willing at all – in other words, yielding to another person’s will – there may lie too small a space for the ...”

“... the batrachoidal Farage likewise. ‘So where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he ...”

“... of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941. He was ‘whisked off to a room in the new annexe of the embassy, locked in with a pen and paper and the necessities of life’, a colleague recalled, and there he wrote, ‘under armed guard around the clock, a document of some seventy pages covering ...”

“... Most mass-produced raw white flour tastes of almost nothing, although if you try very hard, you may notice a faint aroma of wallpaper paste. It’s also lacking in nutrients, even if, unlike coeliacs, you are able to tolerate gluten. As the journalist Wendell Steavenson writes, white flour is ‘a pure starch so nutritionally void’ that by law vitamins ...”

“... for bestiality in 2001, in a review of Midas Dekkers’s Dearest Pet:The taboo on sex with animals may have originated as part of a broader rejection of non-reproductive sex. But the vehemence with which this prohibition continues to be held, its persistence while other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests that there is another ...”

“... convenor told me that Greta had personally invited the bin workers to march with her, which may be true, though I don’t think it matters if it isn’t. Militant GMB workers on a youth climate march; youth climate marchers with the Glasgow bin workers. That is something in itself.So what’s it like in there, the drum-bearer asked me when we reached ...”

“... is that Tunisia has reverted to the kind of dictatorship overturned in 2011. But whatever else he may be, Saied is a product of the revolutionary decade, a period that was unambiguously more positive in Tunisia than in any other Arab state. How could that decade have led to this?Tunisia​ followed the familiar post-independence path from anti-colonialism ...”

“... bringing about a peculiar and unique degree of insideness in their literary relations. Tsvetaeva may have had a brief affair with Mandelstam during the 1914 war; later, and in her passionately personal fashion, she was in love with Pasternak, whose oddly equine profile she described with an affectionate shaft of wit as combining ‘both Arab and his ...”

“... it is more genuine than invented; as Devine puts it, ‘Scotland was born fighting.’ But it may be that it belongs more to the Lowlanders, who after all fought the Wars of Independence, than to the Highlanders. Wherever the Gaelic clans and their claymores were in 1314, it wasn’t at Bannockburn. Emigration and the formation of a diaspora are the ...”

“... both as a critic and as a biographer. As a biographer, he travels to some of the houses that may have served as models for James, and he re-creates as well as anyone could the scenes of authorial composition. Though this novel changed everything in James’s career – though it is the portal through which the writer we think of as ‘Jamesian’, or as ...”