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“... it. From the really nice people he graduated to the ‘lurid and fashionable’, as Augustus John described the artistic set in Twenties Paris. It was the world of the Train Bleu, of Diaghilev, Cocteau, opium and neurosis; a brittle atmosphere vulnerable to clumsy intrusions. Wood had to flee in embarrassment when his uncle and aunt turned up on a ...”

“... When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water ...”

“... it suffers from. Much has been written on the same subject; best-known among recent works is John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances. Craig is concerned not so much with the Clearances in themselves as with the sort of memories of them that have lingered among later generations. He is from Aberdeen, and has no Gaelic beyond what he picks up by the ...”

“... show buildings that are still quite recognisable today; pictures of the ‘Cromwell curve’, with John Fowler’s concrete bridge of 1867-9, are evidence of the scale of engineering work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how ...”

“... was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire. Years later, he discussed this ...”

“... the same, on a more modest scale. There was his complicated relationship with the heiress Helen Sutherland, whom Freeman conjures up in a lightning sketch: ‘In town, she wore exquisite suits, grey silk shirts and perfect hats. In the country, a soft tweed cloak and fur-lined boots (size three).’ Sutherland was one of ...”

“... former loaned to the exhibition in New York) – were sold by Soult to the second Duke of Sutherland in 1835, and hung for more than a century in the magnificent gallery of Stafford House (now Lancaster House). Architectural recesses were specially designed for them, crowned by medallion portraits of the artist, and they were surrounded by a court of ...”

“... foot!Some of this, especially the opera as performed with fervid and overwrought passion by Joan Sutherland as Mary and Huguette Tourangeau as Elizabeth and Pavarotti as Leicester, can take me straight back to my youth. The best music for that, however, is by Robert Schumann. His five songs for Mary Stuart, especially as performed in French by Victoria de ...”

“... making speeches, supporting dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam against Governor-General Sir John Kerr (whom he describes as ‘a rorty farting old Falstaff’), declaring himself a Republican, and writing a play with strong social over-tones. But when the Nobel Prize was awarded to him in 1973 he refused to go to Stockholm to receive it, and the ...”

“... To acknowledge all this is not to deny that, over the centuries, Scottish moneymen like Thomas Sutherland of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Scottish manufacturers like Coats of Paisley, Scottish shipbuilders on the Clyde and ruthless Scottish traders like Alexander Matheson and William Jardine, drug-runners extraordinaire, proved conspicuous Imperial ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... feminist and other good causes. Yet claims of this kind can distort the fiction itself. When Mrs John Dashwood, at the beginning of the novel, rudely asserts her right to the succession of the Dashwood property, and persuades her husband to drop his plan to give £7000 to the dispossessed girls, the method by which she achieves her purpose has more to do ...”

“... Denis: ‘Marnie – wig, smell and all’; ‘Sam Smith, MP for Flint and religious bore’; ‘John Bulman, tutor, whisky lover and cheat’; ‘The misery of picnics’; ‘The Palship, dressed to kill ... ’ In triumphant contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by ...”

“... Nearby was Portman Square, another highly-sought rectangle, the contractor for which was John Elwes, scion of a family of congenital and pathological misers, himself one of the London rich. For a long period these proud squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor ...”

“... I recently discovered that Aigas House is now home to the nature writer and rewilding advocate Sir John Lister-Kaye, who has restored the building to its Scots baronial glory. Aigas is now a field centre, an ecotourism business and the site of two experimental programmes: a Beaver Demonstration Project and a captive Wildcat Conservation Breeding ...”