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“... Of all nations’, writes Ian Ousby, ‘we’, the English, have ‘perhaps the most strongly defined sense of national identity – so developed and so stylised, in fact, that we are frequently conscious of it as a burden or restraint’. I wonder what he can possibly mean by that. The most anomalous thing about England in comparison with all other European nations (of course it isn’t a nation, but even in comparison with Scotland and Wales) is that it doesn’t have the formal marks of national identity acquired even by Iceland or Finland, Luxembourg or Albania ...”

“... as best he could. He also stuck by his friends when they got into trouble. The Conservative MP Sir Ian Horobin had been in POW camps with Van der Post, and when Horobin was disgraced and imprisoned for a homosexual affair with a minor, Van der Post visited him in jail and later tried to find a publisher for his poetry. Although the newspapers were particularly ...”

“... throughout the party: he was elected to the NEC in 1978, ahead of Barbara Castle and displacing Ian Mikardo. He deliberately eschewed office, beyond serving with mutual embarrassment for a year as Michael Foot’s PPS in 1974, and when Callaghan offered him a job (under Hattersley!) he preferred to hold himself free to oppose the Government’s devolution ...”

“... Burns Night groupies, Scottish nationalists of the far left or right, and specialists in erotica. Ian McIntyre, a long-serving BBC producer and the biographer of Lord Reith, has no obvious prejudices but risks seeming too distanced from his subject. Unfortunately even this is a position well represented in the long history of Burns commentary. The standard ...”

“... especially the kings of Scotland, are all ‘baddies’. So are the chiefly lines of the clans Campbell and Gordon – ‘bad’ because they were successful in seizing land and power from others. The Mackenzies, as imperialist in their great days as the Campbells, are allowed to be ‘goodies’, perhaps because of the mess they made of things in the 18th ...”

“... well share something with earlier singers of the unhomely and uncanny, from Thomas De Quincey to Ian Curtis. His Earth, like theirs, is a purgatory where anything can happen and no one can leave: ‘My brother is hanging from the branches/Hanging or swimming/Our T-shirts absolutely blaze.’ He entitled his second book Flies because they thrive on dead ...”

“... Princess Diana, George Michael, Anthea Turner, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they ...”

“... of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current ...”

“... and launched, first as HMS Montrose, just before Christmas 1920. An Armed Merchant Cruiser of the Campbell class, she was fitted with eight six-inch guns and two three-inch anti-aircraft batteries. In 1940, the ship was guarding the sea around the Shetland Isles and, sometimes, it would lead a convoy through the dangerous waters off the west of Ireland. A ...”

“... author of that remarkable first novel about South Africa, Turbott Wolfe. His fellow-countryman Roy Campbell praised his achievement in a poem of the time: Plomer, ’twas you who, though a boy in age, Awoke a sleepy continent to rage, Who dared alone to thrash a craven race And hold a mirror to its dirty face. His voice was described by Charles Causley as ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... talk of the real thing. Here at last was the mean, lethal, almost banter-free figure we thought Ian Fleming had invented, the ruthless, funless fellow we imagined we had always wanted. He had a licence to kill but his real licence was his angry work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the ...”

“... Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped destroy ...”

“... that the partnership was breaking up) and Jack Zunz, chairman of Arups. During the discussions Ian Finlay, the Deputy Chairman of Lloyd’s, met Marco Goldschmied, a partner in the practice, in the washroom. He asked if Rogers would give them something that looked like the Beaubourg. Goldschmied said no. It was the question that the Lloyd’s committee had ...”

“... of DUP politicians in recent years. When the MP and Member of the Legislative Assembly Gregory Campbell was called by the Sinn Féin speaker at Stormont in 2014 he replied, to sniggers from the DUP benches, ‘Curry my yogurt can coca coalyer.’ This is a parody of the Irish, ‘Go raibh maith agat, Ceann Comhairle,’ ‘Thank you, chairperson.’ He ...”