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“... of their own aspirations – despite modern prejudices against absolute monarchy and murder. James Mackay, for example, prefaces his own account of the Queen with similar remarks about her current significance: I make no apology for offering this fresh look at Mary. Writing in the aftermath of the devolution debate and referendum, I have been ...”

“... consistency in its application to their own sons. When Trench turned down the advice of head boy James Mackay and flogged a couple of seniors for staying out late, Mackay told his father, the Earl of Inchcape. Rough treatment of the appropriately-named Viscount Brocas caused dismay in the household of his father, Earl ...”

“... The absurdity of ex-judge James Pickles is not that, the son of a mayor of Halifax and himself an Oxford graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common ...”

“... for literary mentorship, was beginning a PhD at St Andrews on the laconic Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown. Things did not look promising. His PhD supervisor was Alexander Falconer, a wartime naval officer whose ‘masterwork’ was Shakespeare and the Sea (1964), which he had followed up with A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sea and Naval Terms including ...”

“... James Hunter​ ’s work has analysed with utter thoroughness the culture of the Highlands and the diaspora that was forced on it. In his latest book, Set Adrift upon the World, he doesn’t try to describe, in a novelist’s or a journalist’s way, how individuals suffered and grieved and retaliated. Rather, he lays out the way systematic dispossession was managed, legally, by the class who engineered the process and who did so for their own gain ...”

“... by the judging committee. Seriousness goes with choice: significance of specification. Henry James knew nothing of the world of political correctness, but he did insist on the novel being taken very seriously, the significant subject duly chosen, and fleshed out. The result, in his own case, could become a dull though brilliantly intelligent novel like ...”

“... distinctions Forbes is offering. ‘I’m a servant of democracy,’ she told STV’s Colin Mackay. ‘I’m not sitting here as a dictator saying that I will absolutely impose my views.’ But precedent suggests that wherever evangelicals hold power their beliefs do inform their policies. That’s the point. You can see it in Republican states in the ...”

“... as other poets Middleton reveres – Seferis, Trakl, Yeats, Rilke – have ripened, with patience. James Michie’s New and Selected Poems includes Possible Laughter (1959) and a batch of 25 more recent poems, mostly lyrical and meditative work on all sorts of occasions: poems about not being able to write poems, a daughter’s music-box, Vermont – a tribute ...”

“... Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these ...”

“... and wrote part of it down, the fragment of Weir of Hermiston. Ian Bell – like Jenni Calder and James Pope-Hennessy – has written a biography as readable as a romance. Not that Bell surrenders anything to the romantic stereotypes that cluster round RLS. On the dark pockets of Stevenson’s life, he takes a very sober line. In reaction to Balfour’s ...”

“... small-town Scotland, but when they lived elsewhere they missed their homeland. In the early 1930s James H. Whyte with his partner the art critic John Tonge set up a modernist art gallery and bookshop in St Andrews, and Whyte began editing the Modern Scot. In 1935, just as Edwin published his bleak account of a trip around the country, Scottish Journey, the ...”

“... doesn’t say so, but this moment comes from a BBC film called People for Tomorrow, made by Selma James in 1971 and now available on open access on the BBC website. The film follows everyday women in Peckham, Belsize Park, Bristol, reflecting on what might change in their lives and how to go about making this happen, in a movement that is plain and ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass plaque affixed to the frame confidently ...”

“... the spirit of the Protestant apprentice boys who had shut the gates of Derry in the face of King James. This retrenchment had the effect of removing from Protestant identity the level of political allegiance and negotiation. Any reform was, and still is, construed as an immediate threat to fundamental values. Addressing an Ulster Unionist Convention in ...”