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“... will allow, by the genius loci of the islands:     Perennial emblem painted on the shield Held up to cow a never-conquered land Fast in the little General’s fragile hand. The method of Marshall’s book – to deal in turn with the facts of Orkney life, the island, the farm, the estate, the church, the school, and relate them where possible to the ...”

“... believe that the post-war years were in fact a time when nationalistic-technocratic assumptions held sway, even – perhaps especially – in ...”

“... and other forms of topographical literature. The reproductive print trade in its various branches held out the promise of considerable financial rewards, particularly for specialists able to churn out masses of acceptably finished views in a short space of time, but this kind of hack-work could hardly claim the status of a liberal or dignified art. In this ...”

“... books, an old-fashioned resource. It is one of the ironies of literary history that a book widely held to be a danger to young people when it was first published is itself an inquiry into the effects of compulsive reading. Here is a passage from Werther’s first letter, reflecting his enthusiasm for a place new to him on an early summer’s day: Solitude in ...”

“... with the Angry Brigade believed that ministers, policemen and other people in power should be held personally responsible for their actions (hence the bombs planted at their homes). Finally, where the Marxist parties blamed the failure of May 1968 on a lack of coherent revolutionary leadership (and aspired to provide it), the thinking of the libertarian ...”

“... Opposed to them were the Jansenists (after a 17th-century Flemish bishop, Cornelius Jansen), who held that a radically sinful humanity could hope for salvation only if God chose to bestow his ‘efficacious grace’ on them. Unlike Protestants, to whose beliefs on the subject of grace they strayed perilously close, the Jansenists had no desire to break with ...”

“... the corridor of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where Bertha Mason is held captive behind a small black door. More frightening, I’d say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room ...”

“... adhered to a position and not to an individual. The respect in which Revolutionary symbols were held is indicated by their use on more than one occasion to control angry crowds . But appearances were more than a matter of policing. They were a means of marking, symbolically, the shift from the old to the new, but were also assumed to have transformative ...”

“... the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich acquired Chelsea, and 2008, when Sheikh Mansour bought City. David Moores, whose family (the founders of Littlewoods) invested in Liverpool Football Club in the 1960s, got £89 million for his 51 per cent stake when the club was sold to the US buyers Tom Hicks and George Gillett in a leveraged acquisition in 2007. Martin ...”

“... rage behind a public mask of loyalty. The apparent truthfulness of his claim that he had always held his tongue made things worse, not better, as did his insistence that he would have carried on suffering in silence had it not been for McLachlan’s coming forward. This may all have been technically true, but it sounded politically false, because it was ...”

“... Those in power come to believe that because the world is always ‘moving on’ they will not be held accountable for their actions. Chickens do not come home to roost any more. Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire campaigners against NIREX’s attempts to test, as suitable for nuclear waste disposal, the clay of Killingholme and Fulbeck have invoked the ...”

“... journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher writes, that an ‘infidel’ writer such as Hume had no right to such marks of ‘politeness and respect’ from Christian ...”

“... He keeps up a sour commentary for the run of the book. Though his chosen dedications are too often held to be interesting or original, his cast of troupers is held up to patronising scorn. Sir Edwin Arnold is granted audience as a dedicator:                TO MY DAUGHTER Because I know my verse shall ...”

“... lively appreciation of the neglected art of the Western. A short time later, when Terry Waite was held hostage in Beirut, journalists found themselves asking what his links were with Oliver North. I have on my desk the daubs of a class of five-year-olds from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would ...”

“... of straight-talk amid the welter of lies. In a recent article in the Times, Daniel Finkelstein held it up as a watershed in modern political analysis, the moment when someone finally pointed out that public figures are as self-interested as the rest of us. The only trouble is that all the evidence suggests Astor was telling the truth, and Rice-Davies was ...”