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“... first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court his main employment was probably as a secretary. He first appears in Court records in 1500. What can be gleaned of his life before that is ...”

“... the course of the decade. The author turned ten in 1979. Some of what he discovers will come as no surprise to readers who lived through those years as half-awake adults: that, for example, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights and Rock Against Racism were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and ...”

“... dozens of women who found work at the Harvard College Observatory at a time when near enough to no women were employed in astronomy, or any other science, elsewhere. (An excellent book by George Johnson focuses on one of those women, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the under-acknowledged astronomer who deduced a way to measure distances in space.) Writing about a ...”

“... titans – Milton Friedman versus who? – but in 1968 Walter Heller was a well-known figure. The hall, though large, wasn’t big enough to seat the hundreds of balding, besuited businessmen who showed up; closed-circuit televisions had to be installed in adjacent classrooms. Heller was the era’s most influential proponent of Keynesianism, then the ...”

“... at the top. The king, according to Gilbert Burnet, Rochester’s deathbed confessor, ‘thought no man sincere, nor woman honest, out of principle’, and dealt with his subordinates in that light – dissembling, manipulating, ‘hearing every body against any body’. Personality necessarily became something performed, unstable. Burnet wrote that Charles ...”

“... in church and fuss over the curates.Not all are living off their dwindling savings. No Fond Return of Love opens with a congregation (what would be the collective noun?) of spinsters at a conference for librarians, editorial assistants, indexers and freelance researchers ‘on the dustier fringes of the academic world’. Not everyone is dowdy ...”

“... so thin and distracted that the registrar asked if he was a minor, to which Helen replied: ‘No, he’s an art student.’ The tone of their long, complicated but fundmentally happy marriage was set. There was no money but, in another of those magnificent gestures that make the reader want to spring to the defence of ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... came about because my father thought that, at least for a matter as serious as birth, there was no reliable doctor outside London. Indeed it was only for us, us English as he must have thought of us, my mother, my brother and me, that an English doctor would do at all. For himself, until history put a stop to it, he always went to Berlin to see his ...”

“... She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of ...”

“... Head teachers disappear, pushed out by angry governors, and silenced by compromise agreements, so no one can talk openly about what went wrong: one union rep I talked to reckons these deals cost the public between £10,000 and £20,000 a time; in his local authority alone he thinks that £250,000 a year of public money is spent this way. Schools judged Grade ...”

“... who had never much liked Mosley, consoled herself with the thought that ‘she had gone to suffer no more at Tom’s hands.’ (Mosley was always known as ‘Tom’ just as Cynthia was known as ‘Cimmie’.) Mosley himself, in his autobiography, described his marriage to Cimmie as ‘an event in my life of outstanding happiness’ – which leaves open the ...”

“... and 1815, as Fidelio. And that isn’t all. Fidelio must be the only opera whose composer wrote no fewer than four overtures for it (three to Leonore and one to Fidelio, composed for the 1814 version): these works are still played in the concert hall, although, of the four, only the overture to Fidelio makes ...”

“... of the money thing. This is only a street in the sense that it calls itself one. A street with no pavements, no one digging holes. Noting some of the booth names, and heady with competing aromas, I was kneecapped by a four-year-old on his bicycle. His bright blue helmet said: BORN TO WIN.The spectacle of a well-meaning ...”

“... Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards ...”