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“... kind of novel – a jaunty, entertaining, unrereadable sexual comedy with some good one-liners (‘Malcolm was wearing one of his enormous Japanese suits that made him look like a crashed hang-glider’) and a healthy dose of unreconstructed wish-fulfilment. Alex, the main character, is a socialist publisher who has become rich by publishing The Republican ...”

“... from his first official visit to India, the Sunday Times broke the story that Low’s eldest son, Malcolm, had taken part in the brutal suppression of the rebels in 1857, leaving a graphic account in his letters home of killings and public hangings, which, the paper pointed out, would be seen as war crimes today. Cameron’s press office declined to ...”

“... of around a hundred words to the American edition. The most used ‘Scotticisms’, according to William K. Malcolm’s new biography, are modifiers such as awful, bit, coarse, fair, fell, ‘cosmetic rather than descriptive’, easy enough for diaspora Scots, more than a quarter of a million of whom left for North America ...”

“... Square after London beat Paris in the competition to provide the venue for the 2012 Olympics, William Walton’s arrangement of the ‘Agincourt Carol’, from his score for Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version of Henry V, was played to the jubilant masses. The ‘Agincourt 600’ commemoration included an exhibition at the Royal Armouries in the Tower ...”

“... Red Regiment were much younger, just apprentices. None had fought before; only a few in Sir William Waller’s whole army had experienced battle. They trusted in providence, thought of home and tried to obey the orders barked at them. There was dense fog, and the men were only yards from their objective when the cluster of buildings, with their ...”

“... and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a maltster, boasted of wrestling lions at the Tower of London, and supposedly once bit off a schoolmaster’s nose (and swallowed it). He progressed from mimicking radical preachers to providing exorcisms and false prophecy; finally, he claimed to ...”

“... to fall back on. There is a tradition of incurious condescension. It is caught by the underrated William McFee, in a novel of 1928, Pilgrims of Adversity, where he describes the alcaldia or town hall of Havana: A number of officials sat at desks in this large chamber, leaning back in their chairs, bending over documents, reaching for telephones and ...”

“... or even should, a history of nonsense make sense? This is one of the questions raised by Noel Malcolm’s study of English nonsense verse – a book which is itself, appropriately, an apparent sport in a career otherwise devoted to Hobbes’s letters and the geopolitics of the Balkans. Perhaps only an author raised on Leviathan and hardened by the ...”

“... of Leviathan in 1651) were when dealing with Hobbes, who was assumed to be an atheist. (Malcolm thinks this assumption was false, but Hobbes’s close friend Sorbière seems to have shared the common view, judging by his paraphrase of Lucretius in his letter of 1645.) Oldenburg was writing to Hobbes about applied mathematics, but, like so many ...”

“... But the alleged provenance was intriguing. Sullivan invented a psychical researcher called William Doidge, who had, he said, fought with the Scots Guards at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The angel had been caught on camera much later, in the Cotswolds in 1952. It’s a well-known story that British soldiers at Mons claimed they really did see ...”

“... to have their own tanks or bazookas. Many would prefer a virtually complete ban on guns. Joyce Malcolm’s book reopens the question of the right to bear arms by pointing out that it was in origin English, and that the English had an unfettered right to arm themselves until 1920 (and, one should add, there was no statutory control over shotguns until ...”

“... the supernatural. The alchemical papers at King’s have produced several books, most recently William R. Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018). All promote the idea that alchemy and science were, in their own time, inseparable, and that rationalism and occultism were very far from vying for each other’s extinction and the esteem of posterity.Outside ...”

“... it was a mere village, situated a mile north-east of the city on the old Roman road. This is where William Pynchon, a key figure in Malcolm Gaskill’s new book, went to live in 1610. Born in 1590 in Writtle, another Essex village, he grew up to be a convinced Puritan, profoundly unsympathetic to the church of Charles I and ...”

“... of ‘nova’. Suddenly she seemed to have read a lot of books. She refers to Joseph Conrad, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Morvern’s palette has expanded to encompass the Updikean spectrum of emerald, cyan and tangerine. She uses the word ‘whorls’. That this was Alan Warner’s voice rather than Morvern ...”

“... day. Here he is describing one of his boss’s difficulties: Mia had a big white cat named Malcolm that she adored. She was always talking sign language to the cat, who was deaf. Mia’s obsession with Malcolm was bad enough, but the sign language really got on Frank’s nerves. He didn’t mind cats in general, but ...”