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“... own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F.T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best things. It loses nothing by its air of doomed ...”

“... each clan with its name chiselled into a monument like a rounded milestone – Clan Chattan, Clan Cameron, Clan Stewart. Firs stand about like dark angels. The place seems to have its own weather – permanently overcast ... Blink: October 1990: bound for Hatchards in Inverness to promote a book on people’s hereditary memories of the Clearances, we take the ...”

“... nor the nickname is mentioned by Sir John in his autobiography.) We are regaled with details of James Pope-Hennessy’s fatal passion for rough trade. I was taken aback when, later in the book, Lord Weidenfeld is rebuked for recounting events at which he wasn’t present. When John Richardson was present one often has to wonder why or how he got where he ...”

“... set up by the National Trust Visitors Centre, from which the crowds were addressed by Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel, a descendant of the clan chief who had his feet shot from under him in 1746. This was the usual story: a battle between an old way of life and the new; hence hopeless and worthy of tears alone (descendants of both sides at one in grief); and ...”

“... to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP.’ It also gave Cameron the opportunity in opposition to belittle the ‘Alf Garnett’ race politics of the Labour front bench and to pledge to ‘reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour government’. Judging from Labour’s painstaking ...”

“... more than a professor of Byzantine studies … it would be absurd to cast him in the role of James Bond.’ In truth the war was enormously useful to him, allowing him to pursue his research. Afterwards he went to run the British Council in Athens, where the political climate was tense as Greece moved towards civil war, but society was lively. Among his ...”

“... upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling ...”

“... a firm co-founded by Vote Leave’s head of communications and a former speechwriter for David Cameron, whose clients include Citibank, Spotify and Deliveroo. In all, according to analysis by the New Statesman, more than four times as many lobbyists as teachers ran for Parliament in July.The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to ...”

“... over the appearance of the present letters than Tennyson would have been. He once told Julia Cameron that ‘he believed that every crime and every vice in the world were connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records, – that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ...”

“... foundational is required, and at such moments politicians have recourse to party tradition. In the Cameron era, the Conservatives have happily aligned the Big Society concept of charities and volunteers with the ‘little platoons’ championed by their acknowledged forebear, the political philosopher Edmund Burke. One of the few intellectual stars on the ...”

“... legal systems of early modern Europe, arguing that each side of the contrast is a caricature. Ewen Cameron accounts for the ‘smugness’ that radiated from 19th-century British constitutional interpreters, writing that Britons contrasted their enduring ancient constitution with the unstable history of revolutions, counter-revolutions and coups d’état in ...”

“... or Missouri, or Victoria, once homes to the mythical Robin Hood and the real Jesse James and Ned Kelly, no longer are. Still, if we move out from Hobsbawm’s focus on the social bandit as actual individual, and consider the entire Robin Hood myth, the ideal remains familiar in our outlaw-free world. The myth requires a great mass of heavily ...”

“... A bidding war has broken out between the main parties to see who can display more repentance. Cameron (who has repaid the cost of having his wisteria trimmed – Tory excesses are so much more elegant than ours) is leading the field with an ultimatum to eight of his shadow cabinet that they must repay the cost of maintaining their tennis ...”

“... specialised, high-demand skills – whether tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, LeBron James or Jerry Seinfeld – could leverage their assets, market globally, and amass more wealth than any group in human history. But for ordinary workers, capital mobility and automation meant an ever-weakening bargaining position. Manufacturing towns lost their ...”

“... Newsletter of the Millennium Experience), a kind of ersatz theatre programme, features Sir Cameron Mackintosh on one cover and the reservoir dogs of the Labour front bench on the other. Uniform dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a ...”