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“... sober gents with much to lose can take leave of their senses. That was already plain by the 1690s. Douglas Watt’s irresistible, clever book about the Darien Scheme, which ruined Scotland and led indirectly to the 1707 Union, introduces figures we instantly recognise. Here is the mesmerising visionary bounding from cloud to cloud with other people’s ...”

“... and move them north To celebrate my mother’s sewing-machine And her beneath an eighty watt bulb, pedalling Iambs on an antique metal footplate Powering the needle through its regular lines, Doing her work. To me as a young boy That was her typewriter. I’d watch Her hands and feet in unison, or read Between her calves the clear wrought-iron ...”

“... tenderness. Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, the son of a formidable mother, Margaret Douglas, and a dead customs officer, also named Adam Smith. At the age of 14, he went up to Glasgow University which seems, from Ross’s description, to have been in a tumult of religious zeal, a sort of Calvinist University of Cairo; but there he came under the ...”

“... evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that ...”

“... A. Craig, America’s Germanist and Prussianologue naturally offering us ‘... and Germany’, Douglas Johnson doing the same for ‘... and France’, and Peter Clarke doing C’s Economic Ideas 1900-1930. WSC was wrong but not as rigidly wrong as the Treasury, which in 1930-31 was doing exactly what it would do again sixty years later, i.e. upholding the ...”

“... in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles imported ...”

“... Government appears to retain a strong ego-investment in the latter two and (as John Major and Douglas Hurd have repeatedly said) would feel ‘diminished’ if they turned away from England. Ulster Unionists are right to stress the importance of such feelings. They register what is really happening – a psychological withdrawal from Ireland prefiguring ...”

“... and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw the subject had interfered so heavily and helpfully. Being rationally opposed to the entire political, social and sexual order of the times, Shaw was professionally candid on subjects such as sex and ...”

“... go back to women born over a hundred years ago. A late (and much missed) Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, once told me that as an undergraduate at Cambridge he was put in charge of escorting Gertrude Stein when she came to give a lecture in the 1930s. He took her to a tea shop for a snack and Virginia Woolf was sitting at the next table. (Neither great lady ...”