“... if there is a vote for UK withdrawal from Europe, support for Scottish independence could surge. Robert Crawford The Scottish Referendum​ of 2014 is a watershed in the history of Britain. The Union of 1707 as we have known it is no more, even if some kind of union between England and Scotland continues. Scots have been ‘promised’ more powers for the ...”

“... elements on both sides of the Channel have delighted in dressing up in military relics. Young men who wore spectacles to avoid conscription by Napoleon were quick to adopt martial styles when the risk was over. Many of us remember how the dishonouring of uniforms was advanced to an art form in the King’s Road. Tirelessly, Chenoune identifies the ...”

“... with gold and silver crosses, by soldiers of a British expeditionary force in 1868, after Sir Robert Napier’s defeat of King Tewodros, who had spent many years collecting them. They are now in the possession of the British Library and the Queen, among others, and there are no plans to return them. Lalibela was named after a man born in the 12th century ...”

“... from Sotteville-lès-Rouen or Palavas-les-Flots. Droves of admiring postgraduates, like so many Young Raleighs, set out to comb obscure archives, and on their return delivered their reports from the front at Cobb’s Oxford seminar. The way to Richard’s heart would have been for one of us to work on his beloved Lille-Roubaix, whose Revolutionary archives ...”

“... a premium for the privilege of working for it. Huntington was an honourable exception. He paid his young aspirants 25 shillings a week, for which he worked us hard but gave us a thorough grounding in all aspects of the business: a grounding which is no longer possible, so far, at least, as the larger and more rigidly departmentalised firms are concerned. After ...”

“... might be taken for an English colony. The fortress and town of Kronstadt, which protected the young St Petersburg from Swedish attack, are usually thought to have been founded a year after the city itself, in 1704. It is safe to assume that no installation of comparable strategic significance in Britain has ever been taken for a Russian colony. In an ...”

“... of the Palestinian right of return.For a growing number of Americans on the left, especially young people, Israel is seen not as a democracy but as a brutal and racist ethnocracy. Radicalised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and sensitive to questions of racial privilege, white supremacy and state violence, they find it impossible to defend a state ...”

“... trip. Perhaps it was always unlikely that someone whose models were Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Tzara, Robert Walser and Gottfried Benn would win prizes, honours or even a sizeable readership in Britain or the US. And his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased ...”

“... universities, infiltrated the ranks of the professoriat and proceeded to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in ...”

“... 1931, or that Dudley Carew’s memoir, The House Is Gone, was published in 1949 by the firm of Robert Hale? Who is Dudley Carew anyway, and where does Taylor lay his hands on these remarkably recondite texts? Why should one begin a paragraph with the sentence, ‘After publishing his first novel, A Day in Summer (1963), J.L. Carr gave up his job as a ...”

“... making their inspections, they kept an eye out for possible candidates. ‘I have espied one young fole at Croland which in myne opinion shal be muche mor pleasant than ever Sexton was in eny parte,’ Thomas Bedyll reported from Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire. ‘He is not past XV yers old.’The most famous fool of the Tudor era seems to have arrived ...”

“... their context has altered: they emerge against the grain of the argument, not as part of it. Exit Young Tucker, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota; enter Tucker Senior, full Professor at the University of Virginia. And Tucker is robed in professorial garb from head to footnotes. Part One of his book, which covers Tennyson’s career up to the ...”

“... In a letter to Robert Liddell dated 12 January 1940, Barbara Pym speaks well of her progress on a new novel, Crampton Hodnet, which she finished later that year, but which has only now surfaced for publication: ‘It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did. Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end ...”

“... of old women carry particular conviction: Inside every grandmother there sits an attractive young girl mouthing pieties, complaining of sore lips or God knows what. They prophesy the past with unerring accuracy; history for them is painful gossip, halfway between myth and memory A fine sequence entitled ‘Metro’ carries as an epigraph a line from ...”

“... the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz; the early 19th-century English physicist Thomas Young; and the 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed ...”