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“... disillusionment inspired the grim panacea advanced in 1698 by the cosmopolitan, freethinking laird Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Confronting the problem of mass evictions and vagrancy brought about by the famine, Fletcher recommended the establishment of the form of slavery found in antiquity as a means of relieving the poor and putting them to work for the ...”

“... where it came from and why it is worth stealing. And if you quote from memory, get it right. When Andrew Motion, no hero to Amis, says that Larkin’s anthology was meant to promote ‘the taste by which he wished to be relished’ he is adapting a remark of Wordsworth’s – ‘every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... abhorrent to the speaker. Lord Eccles, who had the misfortune to assume Jenny Lee’s job, and Andrew Neil, an uncongenial newspaper editor, are also quite cheerfully attacked for what they did or do in their offices. Others are disliked on perhaps less explicable grounds. I was surprised to come upon a sustained and in my view immoderate onslaught on the ...”

“... biography of Captain Cook by Nicholas Thomas, and many other substantial works. John Sugden and Andrew Lambert have just produced biographies of Horatio Nelson, and a further biography by R.J.B. Knight is eagerly awaited. The Royal Navy is doing very well, thank you. Moreover, all kinds of scholar, many of them not British, have discovered that the massive ...”

“... which more in a moment) was that they ‘did not know how to hate’. ‘I love him,’ he said of Andrew Bonar Law, almost the only politician he had any time for, ‘because he hates.’ The objects of his hatred were many: Liberals, socialists, Irish Home Rulers, the Irish Free State (the ‘Free State of Evil’), possibly the Irish themselves (‘the ...”

“... of the Bank of England, having just been involved in that same capacity in seeking a successor to Andrew Large as chairman of SIB in its existing form, when Brown rang him up and put it to him. All very good news, both because we (the SIB board) had been trying without success to persuade the last government to give legislative time to reform the manifestly ...”

“... George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to read the adjective ‘British’ in the subtitle of the book as an indication of defensive nationalism, we would be seriously wrong. Davie writes of ...”

“... information of a more sensitive kind. The scheme was uncovered when Kell’s deputy, Eric Holt-Wilson, overheard a man on a train talking about having received one of the letters. It was signed by F. Reimers in Potsdam, a name quickly identified as one of Steinhauer’s aliases. This kind of one-off discovery was catastrophic for German espionage because ...”

“... almost anywhere except China, the state can’t avoid elections, nor can any politician do what Andrew Mellon was reputed to have recommended in the 1930s – liquidate everything. We live, after all, in a democracy. To do nothing is politically impossible. To do something, however, requires a proper understanding of what went wrong. Here, much of the media ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed ...”

“... as in his remarkable psycho-historical studies of Jackson and Melville, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975) and Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1985), is to bring together the public domain of American politics – the traditional concern of political scientists like himself ...”

“... was less amenable to ‘modern theories’ – Ray meant psychologising approaches, of the Edmund Wilson kind. Subsequent biographers have tended to fine-tune, amplify or judiciously correct Ray’s version. No one has, or ever will, supersede him. Margaret Forster in 1978 attempted an imaginary autobiography. Ann Monsarrat’s brisk Thackeray: An Uneasy ...”

“... in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his Marxist phase, of falling ‘into a supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death Comes ...”