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“... other favourite hobby. Guest lists meant something then. The novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos ...”

“... incurious about and benevolent towards one of the last living links with their earlier history. Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse probably never met Schiller, but he could be a character in their stimulating book, which recounts the history of his home town. The name of the town itself does not appear in the title, and rightly so: language and appellation ...”

“... as Tombs argues, England was a self-consciously ‘creole’ nation. In the centuries after the Norman Conquest the ethnic Anglo-Saxons and their French-speaking conquerors found a way of becoming English, which more than half a millennium later provided the matter for the great novel of English ethnogenesis, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). It took a ...”

“... was felled. Carpentry can often be far older than anyone imagined. At Chepstow Castle, a mighty Norman fortress designed to intimidate south Wales and western England, the great wooden door of the gatehouse – which is still in place – was until recently thought to be 15th century. Dendrochronology, however, has shown that it was installed around the ...”

“... knew that. Have you come far?’ ‘Only from Westminster, maam.’ ‘And you are …?’ ‘Norman, maam. Seakins.’ ‘And where do you work?’ ‘In the kitchen, maam.’ ‘Oh. Do you have much time for reading?’ ‘Not really, maam.’ ‘I’m the same. Though now that one is here I suppose one ought to borrow a book.’ Mr Hutchings smiled ...”

“... the middle of the 20th century. Can there be a proper history of working-class reading? Jonathan Rose believes that there can be, and after five hundred pages, 24 tables and more than 1600 footnotes it’s clear he has a point. His introduction (still more the publisher’s blurb) makes much of the book’s ‘innovative research techniques’, the need to ...”

“... were honeycombs and her womb a hive. The Queen in Rapture A summer of storms. A stone-built Norman church. Hives in the graveyard. The priest an incomer who preached only sin and redemption. There you have it. Oh, and on one of the corbels a bee in flight, flanked by a jack-in-the-green and a manticore. They swarmed in heavy weather, low-slung and ...”

“... and Basildon to write inevitably self-congratulatory entries. No doubt he would have invited Norman Foster to provide one for Stansted. Pevsner’s own six or eight-week journey around the county was made slightly less uncomfortable than it might have been, and even more economical, by the use of a caravan, loaned by his eccentric editor at the ...”

“... In office, but not in power’. It seemed unlikely that anything ever said by Norman Lamont would make history, but this phrase from his resignation speech struck a chord. A common charge against Labour governments throughout the century has been that they have been at the mercy of other people’s power; that the combined influence of hostile bankers, businessmen, judges and media moguls ‘blew them off course’, as Harold Wilson put it ...”

“... at lower altitudes, all scrambled down over steep, weed-slathered rocks to the landing place. Norman, the mate, brought the tender over to carry us back to the boat. The Poplar Voyager is a 90-foot steel motor yacht, built apparently for some millionaire whose wife decided she didn’t like it. Now it belongs to Bob Theakston, who’s been sailing these ...”

“... real autochthonous thing – we’re the Cruthin aye a remnant of the ancient British people who rose again in ’98 in 1912 and ... ack I forget what date it was but let Ballylumford be our rath and fortress we’re not the ’RA we’re the ’DA know what I mean like? this is Dadmus and the Cragon or With the ’DA in Craigavon if this seems a shade ...”

“... curtains sewn on at the thigh. Downstairs, the dresses are softer and more romantic – rose and dove and primrose and oyster, tulle and organza and puffy silk. Of my fellow spectators on a Thursday morning, pretty well all are female and white and upper-bourgeois-looking, and many have come in pairs: mothers and daughters of various ages, old chums ...”

“... were in the Fifties. But on the whole this ‘album of snaps’ is an artless and glum display. Rose Boyt’s Sexual Intercourse is both a chillier and a more original performance. She evidently read Julian Gloag’s Our Mother’s House in her childhood, and I suspect she has become an admirer of Ian McEwan since then. In the brochure which Cape has ...”

“... with cows. Cotman’s Crowland hangs in watery mist. Like Turner in his detail of a massive Norman column from Holy Island suspended in a tiny sketch, Cotman could conjure up the poignant synecdoche of mighty fragments imbued as much with power as with loss. ‘Crowland Abbey’ by John Sell Cotman (1804). The exhibition largely ignores the fact ...”

“... one to miss a party, popped into the reception being thrown by Commentary’s editor-in-chief Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer and editor Midge Decter, one of the power couples of the Upper West Side intelligentsia – the junior version of Lionel and Diana Trilling. Kazin, a Commentary contributor going back to 1945, found himself in a bobbing ...”