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“... and Hitler. This new edition of his letters, finely selected and edited by Harald Næss and James McFarlane, allows us to judge Hamsun’s entire life and work. He was born in 1859 and grew up in Hamarøy, in the far north of Norway, about two hundred miles north of the Polar Circle. This was a sharp landscape, of mountains, valleys and brief ...”

“... of Latin at Bordeaux, and in Portugal at Coimbra. He was tutor to Montaigne and, most famously, to James VI and I, whose political views he can have engendered only by opposition. He was a friend to Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay and many of the Pléiade company; to Nicholas de Grouchy, the editor of Aristotle, Elie Vinet the mathematician and ...”

“... K.B. McFarlane was one of the most influential medieval historians of postwar Britain, but his name is unknown outside academic circles. This would have pleased him. He grew up in Dulwich, the son of a civil servant in the Admiralty. A day boy at Dulwich College, he won an open scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford and then a senior demyship at Magdalen where in 1928 he became a fellow and spent the rest of his life ...”

“... a necessary phase of experimentalism which, in the carefully chosen words of Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘made its way by spectacle, establishing its practices and its norms, asserting its distinctive significance for the times’, before its achievements were absorbed into a wider current, ‘the Modernist impulse transcending, often, the ...”

“... to the Iranians from 1985 onwards, of the ludicrously misconceived mission to Tehran by Robert McFarlane in May 1986, and of the use to which the profits of the sales were put, have been the subject of inquiries by the combined Senate and House Select Committee. The major questions were whether the President knew of the diversion of funds from the Iranian ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”

“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... James Meek’s early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness – as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and confident that this would be a good thing. These qualities make for many sudden pleasures of reading, but I could find nothing in the two novels and the two collections of stories – McFarlane Boils the Sea (1989), Drivetime (1995), Last Orders (1992), The Museum of Doubt (2000) – that prepared me for the eloquent sobriety of the new book, The People’s Act of Love, and its entirely different sense of what is strange ...”

“... the present-minded distortions of the past found in grand constitutional narratives. Later, K.B. McFarlane applied Namier’s insights to the 15th century, diverting attention from the constitution to the political elite and the operation of clientage networks. From the 1970s early modern revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John Morrill showed that the ...”

“... The argument given in defence of what was done has been, from the start, that sending Robert McFarlane to Teheran was an attempt to exploit a ‘geopolitical opening’. Both versions of the same series of events have been criticised as an affront to the stated US policy of not dealing with terrorists or terrorist states. According to the categories ...”

“... Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the details. Following the death of Clanvowe, ‘for whom his love was no less than for himself’, Neville starved ...”

“... with editions in every major language. This ambition suffered a setback when the paper’s editor, James Whelan, parted on bitter terms, alleging that all power on the paper was still concentrated among a handful of ex-KCIA Moonies. His replacement as editor was Arnaud de Borchgrave, a journalist long known for his extreme right-wing views and his sympathetic ...”