“... Greek philosophy and French painting (meaning the line from Corot to Matisse, from Sardanapalus to Ma Jolie) may be seen as events of equal weight. Both, taken as a whole – the simple fact of them, their coming into being, their import, their purpose – are mysteries. Both speak to a fundamental change in the conditions of representation in the cultures ...”

“... in his own day could be accounted Powell’s leading champion. In a front-page spread in the TLS, John Bayley hailed him under the banner of ‘A Family and Its Fictions’. There was a conflict in Powell, he explained, between the Gothic and Gallic sides of his imagination, which lent much of the richness to his work – provided the former, with its better ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... says’; pro-, ‘in place of’), but mantis, perhaps from a root ma-indicating ‘reveal’, and related by Greeks to mania, ‘raving’. Mantis gives us all those –mancies, those odd subdivisions in the science of knowing the unknowable: geo-, necro-, oneiro-, ornitho-, biblio-mancy, to which one might now add nancymancy ...”

“... Israeli anthem, the ‘Hatikvah’, with its plaintive tune resembling a theme from Smetana’s Ma Vlast, has a decidedly Jewish or Slavic flavour, while ‘Israel’ is musically about as Jewish as ‘The British Grenadiers’. Though my father was a fanatical Jew ideologically, spiritually he belonged to England. This no doubt was why, when he visited ...”

“... another group crossed a police cordon. Ten people were arrested; a few were elderly, including John Lynes, a legendary arrestable in his nineties. Behind the police cordon, where most demonstrators remained, four or five people in flowing red shifts appeared, walking at a painfully slow pace along the tarmac, gesturing mysteriously ahead of them, stopping ...”

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”