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“... it had to be provided with the discipline of its own market economy: such was the conviction of Robert Lowe, Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education under Palmerston, not a businessman, indeed one who thought that the narrowness of businessmen’s views inhibited their effective action, but roped in by Searle to represent that political ...”

“... for Europe. For a while they lived in Deyá, Mallorca, where Mathews came under the influence of Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess lurks behind some of the arcane mystic lore that turns up in the plot of his first novel, The Conversions (1962). A much greater influence on his early fiction, however, was Raymond Roussel, to whose work he was introduced ...”

“... to these technological developments, and there are even attempts to downgrade their significance. Robert Kubicek argues that in numerous armed clashes between the British and local peoples between 1875 and 1907, ‘both sides had modern weaponry.’ So they did, but Winston Churchill was appalled by the one-sided slaughter at the Battle of Omdurman in ...”

“... decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious ...”

“... a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of ...”

“... French verse – as one would expect from a poet in a court where the reigning favourite was Esmé Stewart, James’s French cousin. Technically, he was thoroughly competent and inventive, with a fondness for complicated and often pleasing stanzaic forms. But one is inclined to feel, after a time, that there is a surfeit of foreign kickshaws (though his ...”

“... house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’ – but of course it was much larger, and the company tended to be noisy and numerous, whereas in Sheffield he depended on his middle-class academic colleagues for talk and drinking company and even for ...”

“... the Truth about Ulster. Go home, friend, and read it.’ The book was The Narrow Ground by A.T.Q. Stewart: did the book inspire Paisley, or did the voice of Old Ravenhill inspire The Narrow Ground? Accompanying this question is the problem of the relation of middle-class Unionism to working-class Unionism, or – to put it in cultural terms – the relation ...”

“... know and certain others are intended not to know. Information doesn’t want to be free – as Stewart Brand put it in the 1980s – but it does often require a lot of effort to select the things to keep close, to guard and administer them, and, eventually, to thin out the stock of secrets and let some of them loose. Stores of secrets are supposed to be ...”

“... was just and necessary. The group that carried out the Magoo’s Bar bombing in Durban was led by Robert McBride, a senior commander in uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress. After the end of the apartheid regime, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated that attacks like this one were ‘gross ...”

“... the rebellion, five years after it was finally snuffed out with the execution of Moore’s friend Robert Emmet, this landscape meant much more than it would ever have done in England, where news from Ireland was allowed to fade from the memory as quickly as it arrived. There were a number of bloody engagements in Wicklow in the summer of 1798, as the United ...”

“... times in a fifteen miles trot in any direction that takes your fancy, is the serial propagandist, Stewart Home; always scampering, rabbiting like a speed freak, snorting with derisive laughter, Camden Town or Soho, Poplar or the Elephant, a scandalous pamphlet, the ink still wet, thrust into your hands. Never Ackroyd, not out of doors. I’ve seen him step ...”

“... Liberty Valance was not the man who shot Liberty Valance; or, to put that another way, where James Stewart got all the credit for killing Lee Marvin (the villain again), leaving John Wayne with the actual dirty hands. ‘Print the legend,’ is what the newspaperman says when he’s told the full story. But then, is the deed dirty? Do we object morally to the ...”

“... Russell’s reputation was made by his brilliant defence of the Irish Nationalist MP Charles Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in ...”

“... But in the Fifties, mass air travel and the effect of such films as King Solomon’s Mines (where Stewart Granger, aristocratically handsome, acted as the perfect white hunter) revived safari, and it became such big business that the old élite of crafty white hunters were swamped in their own professional association by opportunistic tyros. The animals were ...”