“... habit is not confined to reviews of Martin Amis. Sutherland’s earlier book quotes Ian Robinson: ‘Take the case of reviews of novels. The commonest style is one of ironic defensiveness, a style which might tell us almost anything except whether the reviewer will commit himself to a novel or not, whether it matters or not. Whatever the novel turns ...”

“... probably started the rot and then there was Glyn Daniel and his bow ties and today it’s Tony Robinson capering about professing huge excitement because of the uncovering of the (entirely predictable) foundations of a Benedictine priory at Coventry. His enthusiasm is anything but infectious and almost reconciles one to the bulldozer. And there’s always ...”

“... by the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy ...”

“... of the group. In August 1876, when he was 21, he wrote to William Ward about their contemporary Charles Todd, later chaplain to the Royal Navy: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o’clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young Ward the quire boy in a private ...”

“... Islamophobia, have succeeded in uniting Thatcherite retirees in the South-East with furious Tommy Robinson activists. For all the talk of Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Marxism’ and ‘terrorist sympathies’, as well as Labour’s real problems with antisemitism, Labour and Momentum look positively liberal by comparison.This faction put Johnson where he is today and ...”

“... son Isaac Butt Yeats. Among Yeats’s best friends at school were two brothers from Sligo, Charles and George Pollexfen, whose family owned a shipping and milling business. Yeats, who was charming and open in his manner, found their seriousness beguiling and made a visit to them in Sligo while at Trinity. The town of Sligo, he later wrote, ‘was ...”

“... to declare the crisis over in the summer of 1847.’ O Grada has analysed the papers of Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and suggests that, throughout these years, Trevelyan believed that the ‘Famine had been ordained by God to teach the Irish a lesson, and therefore should not be too much interfered with’. As early as ...”

“... something boys and girls can read in bed at night along with the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson. But dead she had something more to offer than amusement for ages 10-15; dead she had written, without meaning to or trying to, a book with the force of a masterpiece to make people finally see. One crucial realisation would be just how trivial the Frank ...”

“... the Kellys, who came to Boston from Ireland before the Second World War. Eileen married Ronald Charles Spahr of Philadelphia, the son of German immigrants, and in the late 1950s the couple moved to a three-bedroom colonial house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Everyone you ask speaks of the Spahrs as a classic American ...”

“... the material he conduits. It may turn out that Julian is not Daniel Ellsberg or John Wilkes, but Charles Foster Kane, abusive and monstrous in his pursuit of the truth that interests him, and a man who, it turns out, was motivated all the while not by high principles but by a deep sentimental wound. Perhaps we won’t know until the final frames of the ...”