“... learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it.’ ‘And yet (said I) people go through the world very well, and carry on the business of life to good advantage, without learning.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, sir, that may be true in cases where learning ...”

“... independent person – boy or man – in the community,’ Twain recalled in his seventies, ‘and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us.’ It was Tom Blankenship, rechristened as Huckleberry Finn, who whistled up ‘Tom Sawyer’ for night-time roving when the streets ...”

“... part, involuntary wartime border-crossers, many of whom had then made the best of their situation by collaborating with the Germans, including fighting the Allies under German command. The scale of collaboration, mainly via recruitment to the German armed forces from POW camps, is mind-boggling: Tromly cites a figure of 1.6 million Russians and other Soviet ...”

“... how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified ...”

“... vested interest in contemporary historiography. A good many historians returned the compliment by setting about it with the enthusiasm of crusaders clearing the infidel from Jerusalem. David Herlihy of Harvard derided it as ‘a silly book, founded on faulty method and propounding a preposterous thesis’, while Lawrence ...”

“... all capable of keeping their eyes to the front, on the platform – no droolers, no crisp packets. By Saturday afternoon, a certain mid-term weariness is evident (so many readings survived, so many still to come); the post-traumatic shock of being allowed into the showpiece. King’s College, the part the grockles are never allowed to photograph (too ...”

“... is technically a breach of Parliamentary privilege. Hamilton untied that knot at once. Supported by Lady Thatcher, Lord Archer and the entire Parliamentary Tory Party, he conspired to force through Parliament an amendment to the Defamation Act which allows MPs to waive their privilege in order to sue for libel. Backed ...”

“... By the end of his life Orson Welles weighed 350 pounds. His appetite, though, was not a late development. In Simon Callow’s biography the composer Virgil Thomson reports the 22-year-old actor-director devouring ‘oysters and champagne, red meat and burgundy, dessert and brandy’ immediately before squeezing into a canvas corset to play Brutus in Julius Caesar ...”

“... A generation ago the influence of Fanon’s typology of empire ensured that one could only be either very much for or very much against the great imperial structures that disappeared piece by piece after the Second World War; now, after years of degeneration following the white man’s departure, the empires that ruled Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad ...”

“... describes is a traveller’s nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist ...”

“... fled. His quest disrupts the lives of everyone, Israeli and Arab, in what was once his property. By the end, he discovers in the treasure chest, not gold, but marbles, with which, as the curtain falls, he and the children of the house play on the floor. The play opened in 1997 at the Theatre Festival in Acre, another Arab coastal town emptied of most of its ...”

“... dismissed Derek Lewis from his post as Director General of the Prison Service and appointed David Ramsbotham Chief Inspector of Prisons. Lewis then wrote a book about his experience – Hidden Agendas: Politics, Law and Disorder (1997) – which reflects very badly on Howard. Ramsbotham’s departure six years later was less publicly acrimonious ...”

“... A new history of the British Empire might be expected to concern itself with such issues as the construction of military dictatorship through the imposition of martial law; the violent seizure and settlement of land; the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples (and their culture and environment); the establishment of what is now called ‘institutional racism’; and the continuing coercion and induced movement of labour ...”

“... sleaze’. We have been here before. In 1998 Tony Blair pledged that his government would be ‘purer than pure’, after the former Labour adviser Derek Draper was caught boasting to the undercover journalist Greg Palast about selling his Downing Street connections to business clients. But little has changed in the intervening two and a half ...”

“... shop in Lichfield, but it was forever on the verge of collapse. A childhood spent surrounded by books – learning how they were made, what they cost, and just how difficult they could be to sell – informed Johnson’s clear-sighted attitude to the literary marketplace. Sickly at birth, Johnson contracted scrofula, a ...”