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“... the distinction seems (at least to Knausgaard) impossible to deny. Hence the rage he directs at Ian Kershaw, the author of the classic English-language biography. Knausgaard accuses Kershaw of adopting a dismissive attitude towards the young Hitler, of failing to warm to the passion and innocence of his subject. This excessively ...”

“... book’ or a widely read one, or even the cult of a few. A pity, whether one takes the view of Ian Parsons that it is a literary, historical and bibliographical treasure-house or that of Maynard Keynes, not perhaps incompatible, that its highest quality is ‘a certain magnificent Sillyness, using the word in its ancient sense – admirable and attractive ...”

“... when there were plenty of people to stand by their woman. Those who wrote about her included Ian Gilmour, W.G. Runciman, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Hitchens, R.W. Johnson, Ross McKibbin, E.P. Thompson, Tam Dalyell and Peter Clarke. What they wrote seemed excellent to me, with Runciman bearing the palm for aphoristic conciseness. In embarking on a ...”

“... war. Nicholas writes that the director of the Tate, John Rothenstein, rushed to Paris with Kenneth Clark in 1944, expecting to find impoverished French collectors and dealers eager to sell pictures at bargain prices. Instead they found (in Clark’s words) ‘a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made London seem ...”

“... say’ about Irish Americans ‘is both true and false’, the historian of Irish America Dennis Clark has warned. This isn’t helped by the fact that it has been notoriously difficult to follow the progress of Irish immigrants after their arrival in the United States. The census fails again here. People were not asked where they were born until 1850; only ...”

“... Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn’t Fleming have used ...”

“... the Tory Party. A huge flow of paper about Hamilton and his paymaster/co-plaintiff, the lobbyist Ian Greer, emerged for the first time. The decisive revelation was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with ...”

“... indeed, proved something of a false start and anti-climax to anyone who arrived there with what K. Clark (already ‘a polished hawk-god in obsidian’) called ‘the millstone of promise hung round his neck’. Sligger Urquhart, the Dean of Balliol, a famous figure memorably evoked in A Dance to the Music of Time, seems in fact to have been one of those ...”

“... well established by the early 1930s, for in the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1934), Clark Gable tells Claudette Colbert, his novice companion at the roadside: ‘It’s all in that ol’ thumb, see? … That ol’ thumb never fails.’ It was in the Depression-era US that hitchhiking really took off, and became codified as an act of social ...”

“... Mervyn Peake, living on ‘this desperate edge of now’, or the mercurial evanescence of a Jim Clark or a Joe Orton, counts for little in the scales of achievement when weighed against such elephantine stamina and titanic endurance. This book is, unashamedly, perhaps inevitably, a monument to the loneliness of the long-distance runner, rather than a paean ...”

“... and artistic sophistication. When, in his television series Civilisation (1969), Kenneth Clark asked himself, ‘What is civilisation?’, the answer was: ‘I don’t know … But I think that I can recognise it when I see it.’ What Clark recognised was very much the ‘Western Civ’ idea, stretching back to ...”

“... Amery; industrialists in the arms business such as Arnold Weinstock of General Electric and the Clark brothers, who ran Plessey together with ‘two splendid shooting estates’; the old airplane maker Sir Thomas Sopwith, who owned a lovely stretch of the Test but also a grouse moor, which introduced Pincher to grouse and in turn to Viscount Slim and Sir ...”

“... to see the plausibility of Williams’s account. We need only call to mind a passage from Alan Clark’s diaries. Clark, himself a second generation fringe-Bloomsbury figure, priding himself on his ‘irreverence’, records two occasions on which he broke into tears. The first was when he shot a heron which had been ...”

“... without unnecessary gloating. Still, one can’t help feeling at times that, understandably, the Clark Kent figure of Grieve is lost among the chorus of Stalinist MacDiarmidian Supermen. At those moments one is grateful for quotations from Valda Grieve, the poet’s widow. Her remarks can sketch a ‘Christopher’ whose human scale counterpoints the ...”

“... Palace, the museum of labour history on Glasgow Green. A bronze bust of Willie Gallacher by Ian Walters was not so much unveiled as proclaimed. It sits at the top of the building, in the room where Ken Currie’s controversial Rivera-style murals of working-class history can be seen around the ceiling: but the speeches were made in the Winter Garden ...”