“... club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince ...”

“... especially the kings of Scotland, are all ‘baddies’. So are the chiefly lines of the clans Campbell and Gordon – ‘bad’ because they were successful in seizing land and power from others. The Mackenzies, as imperialist in their great days as the Campbells, are allowed to be ‘goodies’, perhaps because of the mess they made of things in the 18th ...”

“... of the excised sections of evidence aren’t very well blacked out). And here is a question put by James Dingemans QC (Lord Hutton’s chief – and, currently, chiefly benign – inquisitor) to Alastair Campbell: ‘Mr Powell told us yesterday that you had told him that Mr Baldwin had told you that the person who told him ...”

“... seize on any pairings that offered themselves (‘his antagonisms and his ingratiations’ – of James Kelman; ‘drugs … poured their balm, but embalmed him’ – of Robert Lowell; ‘Emmas, Cockburn and Rothschild’ – a Listener cover line; ‘Gray’s Elegy, and Wynne Godley’s’ – an LRB cover line), was always there but became more pronounced ...”

“... two other BTP officers pulled them over. ‘When I was being questioned,’ Simmons told Duncan Campbell in the Guardian in 2017, ‘Ridgewell threw a trophy – something like a football cup – at me. It hit me on the chest and dropped to the ground and he said: “Pick it up.” I almost did, but for some reason I stopped and he said: “Very ...”

“... the blurb stresses, ‘he comes home again and again.’ Linguistically more adventurous is George Campbell Hay’s Seeker, Reaper, a single poem in English, Scots and Gaelic, which is republished in attractively collectable format as a celebration of Hay’s native place – Tarbert, Loch Fyne. William McIlvanney, an accomplished novelist, is another Scottish ...”

“... Hugh Ouston produces work on the institutional changes brought about during and immediately after James VII’s forced cool-off in Scotland in the early 1680s; others of the essays show a willingness to investigate aspects of Scottish society, both civil and ecclesiastical, before the Enlightenment. These voices have mostly not been heard before, and the book ...”

“... In 1851 the trade referred its dispute to a tribunal headed by the author and judge Lord John Campbell. His decision was delivered on 19 May 1852 and published in its entirety by the triumphant Times. Campbell came down uncompromisingly for free trade. The Regulations, they said, were indefensible, and contrary to the ...”

“... meanwhile, may have suffered four miscarriages and never had a child of her own. Lillias Campbell Davidson in her 1908 biography – still brilliant – writes that the queen would become known as ‘Catherine the humiliated, the wronged, the disdained’. But she gives the last word to virtue: ‘She was one of the best and purest women who ever ...”

“... should think that this idea of Bateson’s has come haphazardly into the world, compare William James in 1880: ‘I can easily show that throughout the whole extent of those mental departments which are highest … the new conceptions, emotions, and active tendencies which evolve are originally produced in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental ...”

“... but at least once in modern times in England too. On the sanguine side, my colleague Quentin Campbell, in the days when he was a stipendiary magistrate and so sat unwigged, was passed in a dark street by a car, pulsing with sound, which stopped dead. A black youth got out, marched over to him and said: ‘I know you – you’re at Marylebone ...”

“... legend; she pleased herself, and others came round. When she wrote in a final exam for William James, ‘I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today,’ James understood, and gave her the highest grade in the class. She eventually graduated from Radcliffe magna cum ...”

“... the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was published around 1750 he was not ...”

“... a reward I’m going to let you hear my impersonation of Lord Beaverbrook. My ex-wife Jeannie Campbell was his daughter and he hated me. We just didn’t see eye to eye.’ He then impersonated the great English press baron at length. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think that’s quite good.’ ‘Yeah, he hated me. But we were crazy. When I ...”

“... worse. In their desperation the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait ...”