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“... that. They would also notice some strange inclusions: for example, essays on David Frost, Kenneth Clark, Tom Wolfe and Germaine Greer – Sixties figures to a man. Booker’s earlier book, The Neophiliacs, he tells us, was ‘a detailed, analytical account of the astonishing changes which had come over Britain in the Fifties and Sixties’. This time he has ...”

“... not as though the inner circle of his admirers was composed of dummies: Berlin, Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, as well as, a little later, Noel Annan and Stuart Hampshire – all capable of the odd spot of talking themselves. But they acknowledged Bowra as their master, which was fortunate since no other terms were ...”

“... from Spender’s family and friends, we are told that the typescript was read by Frank Kermode, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim and Karl Miller, a formidable jury who, at the very least, seem likely to have ensured that a satisfactory account of the Encounter imbroglio would be given. Faced with such difficulties and such good fortune, Sutherland has ...”

“... now lies in ruin. Cometh the hour, cometh the word. In an intriguing piece of research for Sleaze, Stuart Weir and Patrick Donleavy have counted the appearances of the S-word in British national newspapers. In 1985-6, it appeared 21 times; in 1994-95, 3479 times. The word still has no precise meaning. Often it refers to politicians’ sexual behaviour, which ...”

“... that kept us all ablaze these last few weeks and months. Bella Caledonia, Wee Ginger Dug, Rev. Stuart Campbell, Alec Finlay, Wheelie Bins for Yes – a cataract of stuff. God knows, in my hours online I wandered down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch ...”

“... and all adversity. Was the restoration of Anglicanism the consequence of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, or the reason for it? With the legal resurrection of the Prayer Book, it could no longer pretend to be wholly consensual. For ever afterwards, the Church of England would be established but it would not be the Church of the whole ...”

“... context, this plan was never implemented. Here, they would appear to have benefited, both from Stuart administrative weakness and from their own poverty. It was more profitable for the Crown to squeeze England further, and it lacked the resources to do both. It is not until the reign of William III that the Scots found themselves making substantial ...”

“... saved a further colleague, Victor Pasmore, from court martial for desertion by leaning on Kenneth Clark to vouch for him as ‘one of the six best painters in England’, but artistically the two were by now on very different tacks. More urgently, there was now no woman, or prospect of a woman, left to give focus to Coldstream’s life. Four years after a ...”

“... of their time was spent attacking the other stall-holders. After Wordsworth, Carlyle, Newman, John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold spoke up for the liberal university and the higher journalism as natural bulwarks against the tide of commercialism. In LeMahieu’s eyes such figures stand convicted of a cultural élitism which stemmed from their-groundless ...”

“... Having sampled Peter Cave’s biker novelettes, and the works of Mick Norman, Alex R. Stuart and Thom Ryder, he nominated the 18-volume Richard Allen Bildungsroman as his template. Delivered from the bourgeois neurosis invention (the demand for fresh ‘product’), his charged and spiteful prose could repossess the reactionary melancholy of ...”

“... own assurances that all is well, the editors have delegated this task to two other contributions–Clark Glymour’s ‘Freud, Kepler and the Clinical Evidence’ and Cosin, Cosin and Freeman’s ‘Critical Empiricism Criticised’. Since its publication in 1974, Glymour’s paper has often been invoked to support the thesis that Freud was a bona fide ...”

“... to make an important contribution to steamboat revenues, though, as the marine historian Andrew Clark notes, ‘it was the enthusiastically reported visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1847 that glamorised and popularised the West Highlands for the wider world, opening up the region’s commercial potential for keen-eyed entrepreneurs.’*Among ...”

“... intelligence war with some important and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and sophisticated of his colleagues. After the ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... I suppose Ingrams would say – and one of those middle-aged men (A. Powell, K. Amis, Alan Clark) who claimed to find Mrs Thatcher sexually attractive. The book is suffused with that self-conscious political incorrectness that the Spectator made its own in the 1980s and 1990s and a good deal of drinking goes on, not least by Cobb himself, and while the ...”