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“... wanker ye.’ I’ve never had this experience in England and have never missed it. Like George J. Watson in his wry and subtle autobiographical piece in The Rattle of the North I believe that English culture, though it’s often a lot less fun than the Irish, contains a core of calm and civility I can never reach, only admire – admire or begrudge. Or admire ...”

“... Their eclecticism is well exemplified by the leader of the Universal Bond, founded by George Watson Reid, who at various times called himself ‘the messenger from Tibet’, ‘Abu Magrigor’ (he took the name MacGregor and had an interest in mystical Islam) and ‘Ayu Subhadra’; he also pronounced himself the archdruid, claimed (like several ...”

“... with prizes for the films, including the Palme d’Or and the Grand Prix at Cannes; Emily Watson was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as Bess in Breaking the Waves. The question that arises is how these blood-stained women fit in with von Trier’s rallying of the avant-garde: whether they say something complex and radical about the human ...”

“... of the wheeling and dealing and finagling (or is it finessing?), you are better off going to Tom Bower’s biography of her husband.* As she sees it, Maxwell made mistakes because he was ‘rash’, a word she uses repeatedly about his trickier business dealings. His faults are essentially over-enthusiasm and naivety. Whether she really believes this or ...”

“... very different from his partner and fellow editor, whose money kept Horizon going. This was Peter Watson, one of the heirs to a margarine fortune, a gentle, tormented, highly cultivated man whose contribution to the success of the magazine was, as Shelden indicates, by no means limited to financial support. Unfortunately he needed and lived with a series of ...”

“... a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?’ So says Lady Thomasina Coverly, the heroine of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to her tutor Septimus Hodge. Her question was echoed a century after her (fictitious) life by the unorthodox biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose mathematical investigations of the living world were collected in On Growth and ...”

“... grouping, whose representatives in literary terms would range from Mr Pickwick through Holmes and Watson and Kipling’s The Light that Failed to Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows. Such men could be benevolent towards women, and prepared to admit that they had a raw deal from society: but they could not allow females to disturb their independence or ruffle ...”

“... a High Tory, and he busied himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract ...”

“... insensitive ‘officer class’ public-school teachers often portrayed by critics. My housemaster, Tom Brocklebank, an Olympic oarsman and a member of Everest expeditions in the Thirties, treated us all as adults from twelve or thirteen and encouraged me to go to the meetings of the local MP, Fenner Brockway. His moods varied between the charming and the ...”

“... Tom Raworth, according to Marjorie Perloff, is the ‘oldest living open-heart surgery survivor, treated in the UK in the first round of heart operations conducted there in the 1950s’. Highlight the ‘survivor’ bit. The last poet left standing in the saloon. (Think Gregory Peck in Henry King’s The Gunfighter ...”

“... choice of The Sacred Wood as the title for a selection of essays derived from Frazer, George Watson quotes the following passage: In this sacred grove mere grew a certain tree round which ... a grim figure might be seen to prowl ... He was a priest and a murderer: and the man for whom he was looking was sooner or later to murder him and hold the ...”

“... of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not fertile soil for this kind of writing. There, British power was too ...”

“... and its puzzling relationship with the Thing – the Establishment. Take the case of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, an eminent chemist, a progressive Whig in his politics and a champion of the equalisation of church revenues, yet who also issued An Apology for Christianity (1776) when he entered the lists against Gibbon. To what extent were Court ...”

“... Sir Eyre Coote, commander-in-chief of the East India Company armies, and Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, who ‘avenged’ the Black Hole of Calcutta and made a fortune there. The abbey is chockful of forgotten 18th-century soldiers and sailors waving flags and sabres, not a few of whom died in their beds.The first fancy non-royal memorials began to turn up ...”

“... Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of Tom Nairn and myself, but more wounding in effect. One of his charges was that Raymond had become half-absorbed, in manner and preoccupation, by the ruling-class academy. ‘Oh, the sunlit quadrangle, the clinking of glasses of port, the quiet converse of ...”