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“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... to the Turks, who were often denounced for degeneracy – swords, slippers and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and ...”

“... the group included Stephen Cambone, Lawrence Di Rita, William Luti and, on a part-time basis, Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Policy Board. Several of them had had a hand in rebuilding the armed forces, kicking the Vietnam syndrome, and winning the Cold War in the 1980s in the service of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. They had, in their own ...”

“... surpassed Britain’s by the early 20th century, the City remained the financial centre: ‘It may be that hides and rabbit skins are being sold from Australia to New York,’ one merchant banker wrote in 1914, ‘or coffee from Brazil to Hamburg, or eggs and butter from Siberia to London, or herrings from Aberdeen to Russia, or machinery from England to ...”

“... the Trevelyan Lectures which he delivered at Cambridge in 1995 on the early Jacobean Parliaments. Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush calculate from internal evidence that the text now edited by them was written in the late 1990s. An expanded version of the lectures, now incorporating several additional chapters, King James VI and I and His English Parliaments ...”

“... is the second big virtue of the book, to match its anecdotal interest. (The selection was made by Richard Stott, who sadly died on 30 July; I suspect it is he who should get the credit for shaping the story.) It is the account of how Blair fell in love with his own certainty and sense of conviction. In Campbell’s early years working with him there are three ...”

“... than I have of the Norwegian context will no doubt discern other, local resonances. But it may be worth bearing in mind that the impact of the Nazi occupation on Norwegian society was especially deep. In trials that lasted from 1945 until 1957, more than 90,000 cases of collaboration were investigated (3.2 per cent of the country’s population was ...”

“... a 1970s TV comedy star, and there’s a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in the barn; in Spring, Richard makes TV documentaries; and the slow-dreaming, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck (whom we first met in Autumn and who returns in Summer – a man for all seasons) awakes from his reveries and returns to the present when he hears a song he wrote playing on the TV ...”

“... been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But, as Richard Norton-Taylor’s pugnacious book shows, it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the ...”

“... Emerson’s poems, Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (‘What piffle!’). Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an ...”

“... as a precursor, is said to be meaningless except when in opposition to something else, which may be true but is not very defiant. I notice in passing that the wartime New Apocalypse gets a mention, though none of its poets rates an individual entry unless, like Barker and Watkins, they made it elsewhere on their own. Poetry London, the only magazine to ...”

“... never the slightest suspicion of obscenity or profanity in the dialogue. Here again, no doubt, we may detect the hand of R.C. Sherriff, for Brickhill makes clear that Squadron Leader Guy Gibson was married, and that the men under his command had normal heterosexual interests. One of the neatest touches in the screenplay comes when Gibson and his chief bombing ...”

“... of profligate oriental luxury circulating in Western Europe. The palace of the Ibelins in Beirut may have been decorated with mosaic and marble. But such conceits were rare even in the richest cities. In rural areas the land was tilled by the natives, mostly Moslems, with some eastern Christians all on the margins of penury. There was hardly any Latin ...”

“... friends. But there is another difference between them apart from writing style – indeed, it may explain the difference in style. When Haines left Downing Street, Harold Wilson offered him a knighthood. Haines refused. Bernard Donoughue is now Lord Donoughue. If blandness is Donoughue’s problem, Callaghan’s is whimsy: The Queen held an evening ...”

“... comprehension of what, musically speaking, had been going on. He recounted that Decca’s A&R man, Richard Rowe (who was to become twice famous, once for signing the Rolling Stones and once for turning down the Beatles),made a number of journeys to Scotland in the years following 1950 and became impressed with the financial advantages which might accrue from ...”