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“... firmly and mistakenly that books about the monarchy always sell. The exceptional success of Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story suggested that sycophantic royal biographies were out, and savage royal exposés were in. Hence the commissioning of a spate of Mortonesque knife-jobs. It was also supposed that what the Sun called the Queen’s bum year ...”

“... journalist of his generation.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ Murdoch said, ‘and who would that be?’ ‘Andrew Neil of the Economist’ was Burnet’s reply. What is our source for this extraordinary conversation? The aforesaid Andrew Neil, on page 25 of this book. Though he immediately describes Burnet’s assessment as ...”

“... and stated that a gunman had shot his dog and attempted to shoot him on Porlock Moor. The gunman, Andrew Newton, said he had been hired to murder Scott, and the prosecution tried to link the shot on Porlock Moor with a group of Liberals, con-men and bon viveurs who were endeavouring to protect Thorpe against Scott’s allegations. In the course of the ...”

“... recognition it deserved. The catalyst was the publication in 1975 of the Harvard ant expert E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. Although it was primarily about animals (especially social insects such as ants), Wilson had also ventured boldly into human territory, settling firmly for nature in the face of the nature-nurture ...”

“... doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are ...”

“... 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 Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon ...”

“... caretaker Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, never got to hear what happened and Sir Harold Wilson, when he came to power, was told nothing of this fail accompli for three years, and then in so veiled a way that his memory had to be jogged in the eventual scandal of 1979.’ At a time when dissatisfaction with an outmoded Official Secrets Act is largely ...”

“... in the light of episodes concerning, Scottish writers, mostly of the 18th century: Tannahill, John Wilson of Greenock – and, in ‘Green Breeks’, a famous anecdote of Scott’s boyhood is subjected to an extremely deft and somewhat mean-spirited reversal. The volume as a whole gives a sense of substantial and sensitive gifts embarrassed by a strange ...”

“... for someone to blame, so they blamed the president.In that year’s presidential election Woodrow Wilson lost the state of New Jersey, where he had once been governor. The biggest swings against him came in the counties nearest the shore, where the switch of allegiance was comparable to the turn against Herbert Hoover at the nadir of the Great Depression. In ...”

“... and loathing, which is chiefly a warped form of embarrassment about one’s former admiration. Andrew Biswell’s new biography, which generously allows Burgess’s friends and enemies to speak in their own voices, flushes out the worst aspects of Lewis. It presents Burgess’s life with a sobriety and care that are at once admirable and slightly ...”

“... access to closed papers in order to produce official histories. One of them was Christopher Andrew, who employed Walton to help him with The Defence of the Realm (2009), about MI5. Suddenly, one kind of conspiracy story – official plots and cover-ups – became acceptable. So Walton can now assert at the end of his book, without doing much damage to ...”

“... I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above everyone else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official biographer, have been at fault here ...”

“... Field has evidently been forbidden to quote from Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), thus fatally impoverishing his account of the author’s most important literary relationship. (Karlinsky, incidentally, has his little say about Field’s ‘enormous blunders’ in the preface to his volume.) Not to put too fine a point ...”

“... popular films featuring notable individual male characters as Goodbye, Mr Chips, Citizen Kane, Wilson, Casablanca and Henry V.’ This is ‘coverage’, and we feel that his heart is not quite in it. It would appear that, when writing about his war, Fussell finds it difficult to spread himself around. As he once testified, he is ‘really a pissed-off ...”

“... and have close parallels in the work of more prosaic Glaswegian architects, such as Charles Wilson, whose Free Church College of 1855-7 also features a portico raised above a high base and highlighted by towers. What distinguishes Thomson from even his most talented contemporaries, such as John Burnet Sr, or the Gothically inclined J.J. Stevenson, is ...”