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“... Canada, who haunt his college and his stories, along with the ghosts of Queen Victoria, George V, Mackenzie King and the Devil himself). He noticed that Oxford was haunted by that eerie scholar, Montague Summers, who dressed like a Mediterranean priest but was always accompanied on his afternoon walks ‘either by a pallid youth dressed in black, who was ...”

“... that survived in the 1720s were the people who adopted the label as a form of self-assertion (Sir John Hyde Cotton of Madingley is an obvious example), men who had absolutely no intention of risking so much as a farthing on the cause; and those who, like William Shippen, used it as a title for their disgust at the mechanisms and ethos of Whig rule and who ...”

“... knowing how to choose, I gravitated to Elizabeth Bowen – along with others, including Compton Mackenzie and Hugh Walpole, of whose writing I can’t now recall even the faintest flavour. I’d never heard of any of them – I’d not heard of anybody much – but I was reassured by bound sets of collected works, because in the children’s section I’d ...”

“... that had become available for the accurate measurement of blood pressure. Sir James Mackenzie, the patron, and Thomas Lewis, the leader of the scientific school and as much a physiologist as a physician, still held that ‘the trained finger’ was the best instrument for measuring arterial pressure. Science made perhaps its first incursion into ...”

“... At bedtime, tears would gather in his blue-bloodshot eyes as he read his favourite poems to us. John Dowland’s ‘Weep you no more, sad fountains’ was a favourite. Another was Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me’. Both injunctions not to cry made us cry too, as such injunctions do, the admonishment of the ...”

“... seal-fur sporran, had I been able (aged nine) to find out from such a book as this latest work of John Prebble’s that all these tartans were nothing but hype: a stunt devised chiefly by Scott to make George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in August 1822 as splendiferous as possible. In his anonymous shilling pamphlet ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF ...”

“... Bloomsbury homosexuality. A year later came Lawrence’s abortive effort at blutbrüderschaft with John Middleton Murry. In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William Hocking; then, just as he was putting the finishing touches on Women in Love, came his involvement with the failing marriage of Godwin and ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... been much written about by inhabitants who were novelists and poets. On Barra he visited Compton Mackenzie and talked about Welsh nationalism and the desirability of the islands attaching themselves to the Irish Free State. MacIver helped him see that Gaelic poetry dealt with material realities and not ‘the Celtic Twilight’. That the islands were ...”

“... for writers of bestsellers. Somerset Maugham dabbled in spying, in Switzerland and Russia; Compton Mackenzie became director of the Aegean Intelligence Service; Hugh Walpole ran the Anglo-Russian Propaganda Bureau in revolutionary Petrograd; A.E.W. Mason, who had been a Liberal MP, was a secret agent in Morocco, Spain and Mexico; Hall Caine, whose new novels ...”

“... many other journalists, he cannot help being amused by the chutzpah of the Sun’s editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, by his professionalism and by his wit. He devotes page after page to anecdotes and Kelvinisms, many of them so coarse that they would not even get published in the Sun itself. Noting MacKenzie’s hostility to ...”

“... a long time before she wrote this essay. She complains in a 1918 review that a novel by Compton Mackenzie moves too fast, like a movie, with one image relentlessly following another. Yet by the time she wrote Jacob’s Room in 1922, she appears to be experimenting with this method herself. She wrote in her diary in January of that year that she felt time ...”

“... early 1980s were fronted by gay men, Steve Strange, Jimmy Somerville, Pete Burns, Boy George, Leee John, Morrissey, Billy Mackenzie, Holly Johnson and Marc Almond among them.Not since the Supremes and Diana Ross had a pop group produced a lead singer so clearly destined for solo success. ‘Careless Whisper’, though ...”

“... Minds have been made up about John Updike. A typical review will begin by grudgingly acknowledging the brilliance of his ‘style’ – as if Updike’s style were a set of dainty curlicues, and not his manner of thought – before complaining about his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language ...”