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“... with as ridiculously weak a claim to the throne of England as any monarch since William the Norman. The root of it was a marriage: a love-match between Henry V’s French widow, Catherine of Valois, and her Welsh servant Owen Tudor; a marriage certainly valid in the eyes of God, but in English law made illegal by an act of parliament, since it had not ...”

“... in the 1980s, have gradually been frozen out again? Much has been made once again this summer of Norman Tebbit’s absurd cricket test, which demands that immigrants to this country support the England team. What makes it particularly absurd is that cricket, a game with genuinely multicultural appeal (unlike football, which despite its popularity in all ...”

“... Fenians had attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It makes me wonder what Yeats and Burne Jones would have said had they seen Norman Tebbit under the ruins of the Grand Hotel. For Yeats, ‘good earth power’ is the force which inspires what he terms ‘sound national doctrine’. That doctrinal force is to be felt ...”

“... an actor who doesn’t speak and is therefore non-existent on the page. It is there, as Emrys Jones suggested, in the sheer scale of Shakespeare’s tetralogies of history plays, and in their structure of fall, bitter consequences and ultimate redemption – the pattern that goes from the domestic strife that loses France and divides England to the ...”

“... of antique beechwood and villages with eloquent names such as Swyncombe. From the time of the Norman Conquest onwards, Wiseman writes, those woods were cut for timber and charcoal, pannage was restricted, sheep came to the fore, and the hardy, semi-wild pig of the open forest seems to have lost ground to an animal fattened on cereals and legumes or housed ...”

“... beautiful with honeysuckle, clematis and lupins. The church is particularly interesting. A Saxon-Norman central tower has become a west tower with the disappearance of the original nave. Now a small Norman nave runs east of the tower on the site of the first chancel. There is a fine fresco above the chancel arch – a ...”

“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”

“... moment of humiliation in Roth’s novel comes when Mickey Sabbath, taken in by his old friend Norman Cowan when no one else will help him, is discovered by his host arousing himself with intimate items belonging to Norman’s daughter. In Mother Land it comes when Jay, on another Friday morning invasion of Mother’s ...”

“... at Holkham, was done according to the traditions of the landed aristocracy. The bride wore a white Norman Hartnell gown; the long gallery was filled with presents, ‘including a silver inkwell from the queen’. Tenants from both family estates feasted in three marquees in the park, each with its own wedding cake. Princess Margaret, still single, was among ...”

“... significant expression, often in the apocalyptic idiom constructed for the purpose and explored in Norman Cohn’s works. (Aldous Huxley, in Overy’s quotation, sees ‘Belial’s guiding hand’ in modern history.) There are good reasons in European history why the sense that ‘we’ – however defined – feel under threat from outside enemies or inner ...”

“... points are the Greeks, the Gothic of Chartres, the Georgian terrace and the English Renaissance of Jones and Wren, which are admired but not venerated. Wren appears inside St Paul’s, a Baroque feature in himself with curly wig and generous embonpoint, surveying the dome through a spyglass. Arriving at the present, Lancaster watches it go past on the ...”

“... of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be ...”

“... Need we feel superior about Betjeman’s verses about ‘Phone for the fishknives, Norman,’ or about the lines in his Summoned by Bells that Furbank quotes? A single topic occupies our minds. ’Tis hinted at or boldly blazoned in Our accents, clothes, and ways of eating fish, And being introduced and taking leave ... That topic ...”

“... and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and Zionism) and Roy Jenkins (the Government of 1951-55) are predictably good. The uneven John Keegan (... ’s ...”