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“... reluctantly, of his unscrupulous cunning. But it emerged pretty clearly from the Hutton and Butler Reports that he had persuaded himself of both the practicality and the virtuousness of what he had made up his mind to do and had then arranged to be sheltered from any information that might have given him pause. (Alastair Campbell to John ...”

“... of course highly topical. The publication of Aristocrats has more or less coincided with that of David Cannadine’s Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain, which follows some of the themes of his earlier book, Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. Tillyard’s modishly-titled contribution is an enormous account of four ...”

“... chaplain, no less); John Hull the piper with Alison, a blood relative of his former wife; David Webbe with Eve Elvell. Most of them were reported to be ‘outside’ the parish; that is, beyond the reach of the bishop’s crozier. But one more thing, reverend father: ‘John, chaplain, as it seems to them, is not firm in his faith, because he has ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... touted names in contemporary North American literary criticism and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 ...”

“... the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s an ...”

“... that dispose one somewhat more against Tennant. Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered ...”

“... house by crawling through a dressing-room window left open by prior arrangement with the butler, secured an assurance of loyalty from Dillon, and rushed back to Kennedy, who gave Dillon the job. Graham also recommended his friend David Bruce for Secretary of State, advice the President-elect didn’t take, choosing ...”

“... on all sides with deep apprehension. The nearest analogy in British political history, as Rab Butler shrewdly remarked in 1940, was not the ultra-respectable William Pitt – a pilot who in fact failed to weather the storm – but the raffish, unreliable Charles James Fox, another politician with no deep attachment to the social order. Certainly Churchill ...”

“... makes both his parents laugh, his mother to the point of paroxysm, is the confession that their butler now turns down their beds at night and puts in the hotwater bottles. ‘Makes the beds in the morning too,’ his father adds. So what? one might ask. Well, it would take another volume to explain the what if it isn’t clear, and that is not Stern’s ...”

“... mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook of the Caroline gentry. Beneath that social level, as one would never guess from the standard social histories of the period, huge audiences watched history ...”

“... The connection between science fiction and racial otherness, established in the work of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany among others, is glimpsed at here. Bruce Sterling’s description of William Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetic as combining ‘low life and high tech’ applies in the grocery store scene, with the boorish security guard, the racialised ...”

“... meetings were hugely popular during their visits to Britain in the 1870s and 1880s, leading David Bebbington to make the startling claim that ‘Moody and Sankey probably represent the chief cultural influence of the United States on Britain during the 19th century.’ Of course, if one really took seriously the criterion about having ‘in some way ...”

“... love because Chamberlain made him parliamentary private secretary, or unpaid bag-carrier, to Rab Butler. ‘Chips at the FO, shades of Lord Curzon,’ he wrote in awed tones, unable to see that he was less Marquess Curzon than Mr Pooter. His self-importance is evident throughout the Diaries. ‘I have frustrated [Churchill],’ he wrote in July 1939. ‘He ...”

“... problem, and the visual similarity of the Doctor’s second-best adversaries to C3PO, the trite butler-robot. Which is why Cybermen no longer impress us. The metaphorical connections no longer lead adults, at least, to things we find exciting – unlike priests, Nazis, our shabby 1960s and 1970s childhoods. Or so it might appear. Like everyone else of my ...”