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“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old PR sequence that traditionally went from politician’s policy, through spin doctor’s presentation, to journalist’s story. Why not run Downing Street as ...”

“... was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he ...”

“... it was ideally suited to the needs of a man who wished to live in society but for his art. Henry James, Proust and Degas were all, like Delacroix, supported by it. When they went home it was to a housekeeper and the muse – who, Delacroix wrote, ‘is a jealous mistress. She abandons you at the slightest in fidelity.’ Home was for being alone, for ...”

“... breed British chemists. It was founded in 1845, the result of a private subscription set up by Sir James Clark (the Queen’s physician), Michael Faraday and the Prince Consort. Its first director, recruited from Germany, was August Wilhelm von Hofmann. Perkin became a student there in 1853. Hofmann was already investigating coal-tar derivatives, aniline in ...”

“... and Michael Wilson describe in their new biographies of Soane and Kent illustrate the division. James Gibbs had a more complete architectural education – in Rome – than any of his British contemporaries. He was a Catholic, and his career suffered because of it, but through his buildings at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the churches of St ...”

“... or like the biker’s leather jacket, ‘donned impersonality’.In an extended interview with James Campbell, published in 2000, Gunn said of his mother’s death: I wasn’t able to write about it until just a few years ago. Finally I found the way to do it was really obvious: to withdraw the first person, and to write about it in the third ...”

“... When Daniel Craig took on the role of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006), there was much talk of the real thing. Here at last was the mean, lethal, almost banter-free figure we thought Ian Fleming had invented, the ruthless, funless fellow we imagined we had always wanted. He had a licence to kill but his real licence was his angry work ethic ...”

“... the ducking back and forth across the line into pastiche (there is, for example, a complete M. R. James-like ghost story) which makes, occasionally, for too-conscious artfulness. How Fred (son of the rectory) and Daisy (failed student nurse) get together and get on is not separate from other stories of 1912 – of how atomic physics was developing and of how ...”

“... fox was pretty and troublesome. I am glad to know, incidentally, of a lady who called her pet fox James after a (sweet-smelling) contributor to the London Review. A fox group, usually a dog fox and several related vixens, occupies a territory, which it hunts in and defends. Subordinate, non-breeding vixens help in the defence of the territory, and may spend ...”

“... it, nothing goes on in posh hotels, nobody meets under clocks at stations, there’s nothing like James Bond, nothing glamorous about it at all. Maybe if you get into top level it is glamorous because you’ve got a lot more money, but it’s not glamorous, so maybe dealing with a woman is a bit more glamorous, I don’t know. I think we get her ...”

“... modest critical success and further novels followed: Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He Is (1792) and finally Hermsprong. Bage told Godwin that he believed ‘he should not have written novels, but for want of books to assist him in any other literary undertaking.’ Not that the reluctant novelist was uneducated. In ...”

“... began as a 16th-century state intervention, an act of internal Scottish colonisation, part of James VI’s attempt to curtail the autonomous power and culture of the Highlands. In 1597 the king and parliament in Edinburgh decided to plant three new towns in the Highlands as bearers of Lowland Scottish values: English against Gaelic, Protestantism against ...”

“... first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He is equally familiar with the facial ...”

“... pink arms reached out to him, like it knew and trusted the deep well of goodness from which Wullie Campbell had sprung.’ He puts the boy in his pram, goes out for a walk and returns alone. When Lizzie asks him where her baby is, he replies: ‘What baby?’Agnes only learns of her abandoned (or worse) half-brother as an adult. ‘What man takes a baby and ...”