“... Regular Army. Some UDR soldiers were also members of Loyalist paramilitary groups, however, and took part in a number of notorious sectarian killings. It is estimated that some two hundred members or ex-members of the regiment were convicted of criminal offences during its first ten years. At the centre of the debate about paramilitary collusion with the ...”

“... scarcely a word of it; the wholly other and the all-too-human; the virgin ascetic who accused John Locke of trying to ‘embroil’ him with women, and the supreme London boulevardier whose consuming passions included Château Haut-Brion, the theatre and serial embroilments with women. Turn the page and the odd couple is joined by a third, for here ...”

“... Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors (2017) tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or ...”

“... south from Washington, heading to New Orleans. Their journey, dubbed the ‘Freedom Ride’, took them through the upper South, where their affront to Jim Crow was mostly greeted with harsh stares, to the Carolinas, where some were arrested, through Georgia, and into Alabama – the heart of the Deep South. On 14 May, just outside Anniston, Alabama, a ...”

“... that a firm, clear, shared language would show the way to a true socialism. And although each took a holistic view of language, neither showed any interest in a unified account of the world. All these philosophers, however, did assume that the point of language was to describe the world, however difficult or indeed impossible it might be to know that ...”

“... It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book. It is generally thought niggardly or envious to complain about a writer’s abundance (a book a year, roughly, in Updike’s case). Most novelists, it is said, would pant to exhibit such a fault. Or the case is made that it is otiose to complain about the mediocre books when there are so many fine ones; the odd truancy in a record of such inspired application is inevitable, the waterfall has its chilly underside and so on ...”

“... more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the ...”

“... the head inspires discussions of mental illness, hairstyles, beheading, and the rival relics of John the Baptist’s head. Under the rubric of skin, Hartnell ad-dresses flaying, leprosy, plastic surgery, racial difference and manuscripts – for, as others have pointed out, most of what we know about the premodern past is written on the skins of dead ...”

“... making a dissonant off-beat one-two of female distress. The woman put her hand on her chest and took a breath. ‘Jesus! I’m sorry,’ Iona said. ‘You startled me. I thought I was on my own. I’m Iona.’ ‘Nousche,’ said the woman, who had the trace of an accent – French? Italian? That must be her name: Nousche. She was wearing a light, filmy top ...”

“... civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books about the horrors of Marxism’. ‘At the moment I’m rereading The Fourth Protocol,’ she happily tells a journalist. Rereading. Jonathan Miller talks of her ‘catering to the worst elements of commuter ...”

“... you feel, so that Kiberd could play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and ...”

“... should do things much less ambiguously: their acts cannot be filtered through the head of John Dowell, the rich American simpleton (if indeed that is what he is) who tells the story. Moreover Dowell has to be there with the others, objectively represented as well as in voice-over; and it is beyond the power of any actor to play an impotent bonehead ...”

“... Iain MacIver shows his complicated personal involvement in the great storm in the Scottish Church, John Pinkerton discusses his place as a lawyer, and Karl Miller the evidence his preferences give for the changing literary taste of the day. Before the proliferation of central government departments and local administrative bureaucracies the judges in Scotland ...”

“... Splendid​ specimens of the untrousered, strong-legged Celt’. That was what John Stuart Blackie, the founder of Scotland’s first chair of Celtic studies in 1882, liked to see about him in the Highlands. In Celts: Art and Identity (at the British Museum until 31 January, then at the National Museum of Scotland from 30 March until 25 September) he would have met several untrousered, strong-legged giants ...”

“... and there was nothing like empire to give vanity rocket-like lift. In Karsh’s photograph of John Buchan, who was governor of Canada in the 1930s, the wildly popular novelist wears a North American Indian war bonnet, his weathered face is in semi-profile, he’s wearing gloves, and he looks as if he could take on an army on his own. Sargent’s portrait ...”