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“... savouring of the land – the ‘landscape’ – must overlap with more workmanlike uses of it. Ian Thompson’s history of the Lake District is grounded almost exclusively in the aesthetic. ‘Since the Lake District is an imaginative construction,’ he argues, ‘it has no real boundaries, physical or historical.’ So he is thinking of it as a region ...”

“... other community. Ulster is, and remains, a collage of confessional territories. As the late A.T.Q. Stewart remarked in his history of Ulster, The Narrow Ground (1977), every resident of the province carries around in his or her head a complex and detailed geography: they know which villages or streets are Protestant or Catholic, or mixed. These internalised ...”

“... trees go back and states that ‘there is only a slim chance that any Scot does not possess more Stewart blood than the Queen.’ By the same appeal all Englishmen should insert King Alfred into their family tree. A further refinement of snobbery offered here is that of antiquity of language. The fact that Scottish Gaelic carries some archaic features is ...”

“... his chest, he lit a cigarette to deceive his men as to the seriousness of the wound. Patrick Shaw Stewart, who reminisced longingly of hot baths and starched shirts, wrote: ‘Every time I remember that nearly all my friends are dead I take some form of imaginary morphia, and promise myself work or love or letters, or fall back on the comfortable reflection ...”

“... In 1969, while he was serving a prison sentence for unlawful assembly, Ian Paisley sent this message to his congregation: I rejoice with you in the rich blessings of last weekend. I knew that our faithful God would pour out His bounty. In prayer in this cell I touched the Eternal Throne and had the gracious assurance of answered prayer ...”

“... Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical marxisant ...”

“... The Independent on Sunday of 22 December last weighed in with a mere forty crystal-gazers, from Ian Angell, ‘darling of the doom-and-gloom conference circuit’, down to Theodore Zeldin’s ‘persuasively touchy-feely manifesto’, An Intimate History of Humanity. Yet quite a few gloomsters were not checked in, notably éminence noire Conor Cruise ...”

“... equivalent of the Sgt Pepper’s sleeve: George Foreman, Penelope Keith, Wayne Sleep and Jackie Stewart all choose ‘All You Need Is Love’ on Desert Island Discs; Malcolm Muggeridge and the Maharishi Yogi preen and worship, worship and preen in the same Fabs-scented air.Brown is best known as a master parodist, ventriloquising the voices of public ...”

“... An arthritic Chuck Berry on TotP, slobbering the playground snigger of ‘My Ding-a-Ling’? Rod Stewart jiggling his satiny wee buttocks like some bored old burlesque artist? Any of this doing it for you, kids? The backroom intimacy spotlit by Mapplethorpe and Smith looked deeply subversive, but had none of the usual tawdry appliqué of ‘erotica’: its ...”

“... German film – beautiful and extravagant and fantastic, and nevertheless go against the grain.’ Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is in large part a book about dreams, and about interrupting them. Fassbinder belonged to a generation of left-wing artists, musicians and filmmakers whose aim was to shake their audience out of a slumber. You ...”

“... of Memoirs of a Revolutionist, was a paragraph which put the case very deftly (the reviewer was Ian Watt, author of The Rise of the Novel): Macdonald has genuine analytic power, but he is perhaps best as a satirist; with his quick allergy to cant he in many ways resembles Mencken, and has traces of the latter’s tendency to view the spectacle of human ...”

“... do the revelations on secrets amount to much, with two exceptions. One concerns the life of Sir Stewart Menzies, wartime head of the Secret Intelligence Service, which is, predictably, based on ‘private information’ and ‘personal knowledge’. Yet, uniquely among all the entries, this contribution is unsigned. Is this sinister machination, or merely a ...”

“... names, double and triple barrelled: Heathcote-Amery, Bonham-Carter, Sackville-West, Vane-Tempest-Stewart. And mostly their forenames ended, as well-bred girls’ forenames must, in ‘a’: Nigella, Cosima, Candida, Sophia, Samantha, Sabrina, Lucinda. ‘Famous Englishmen write to me about their daughters,’ Attallah shrugs. ‘What else can I do? I have to ...”

“... Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by ...”

“... of Information, and documentary-makers found themselves in demand as producers of propaganda. Ian Dalrymple, the director of the new Crown Film Unit, became Jennings’s supporter and trusted adviser. London Can Take It (1940), his first notable wartime documentary, made with Harry Watt, is in many ways typical ‘spirit of the ...”