“... less sympathetically on his compulsive rituals, facial tics, and the strange noises he made, which may have been symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. In later life, Johnson told a friend that he had never tried to make a good impression on anyone until after the age of thirty, ‘considering the matter as hopeless’. He disliked speaking about his background ...”

“... their character and dynamism, not the LEAs. All sponsors have a corporate view of schools, even if Richard Tice, chair of governors in one of the first academies, Northampton Academy, is unusual in the frankness with which he espouses the corporate model: the school as a business and the head as a CEO. All put tremendous emphasis on leadership and the ...”

“... of Vanity Fair. In ‘real life’, Meredith judiciously observes in his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ‘all hangs together,’ but that’s not obviously the way things work in the Meredithian world. What did his admirers see in him? A good place to start is G.M. Trevelyan’s The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906), which helpfully ...”

“... burned at the stake in front of jeering crowds. Imaginative though Dante’s infernal punishments may be, the spirit behind them was familiar. It would be hard to miss the continuity between history and the Inferno. What was Dante’s position in all this? The third child of a mother who died when he was very young, he belonged to neither the old landed elite ...”

“... of moral language, and this project was taken up and carried out with exceptional skill by Richard Hare, a contemporary of the four who had returned to Oxford after a horrible wartime experience as a prisoner of the Japanese. (I once heard him say about The Bridge on the River Kwai that while the film’s settings were disturbingly realistic, having ...”

“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... interesting about them. Mr Clark rather disproportionately brings Yeats in at this point. Yeats may have concerned himself with the sacred mysteries, but they were not where he saw and heard poetry. He saw and heard poetry in real life. Mr Clark concedes that Yeats developed towards a pregnant natural speech as Brennan did not, but he could have conceded ...”

“... context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. Even though the American people may not know what has been done in their name, those on the receiving end certainly do: they include the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos ...”

“... the assistance of the occupation, for which Bush and Blair wanted backdated cover from the UN. In May, at Annan’s urging, the Security Council ratified the Anglo-American seizure of Iraq, voting unanimously for Resolution 1483, which endorsed Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, and pledged the UN to play a ‘vital role’, as requested by the White ...”

“... critical works like this ‘will ever make much contribution to the common wisdom’. ‘We may have here an avant-garde that will never be joined by the main army – happy enough behind the lines and content with its familiar rations.’ Kermode is writing these words in 1980, and reflecting not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new ...”

“... over my body too. The immobile is in a fixed, restful state, whereas ‘motion, however swift it may seem, tends essentially towards immobility, and thus, however slowly it may sometimes appear to do so, continually conducts bodies towards death.’ The Bathroom may sound offputtingly ...”

“... is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the area in which humility was appropriate, complained that her ‘absence of humility ... narrowed her influence to those whom she happened to like and who happened to like her’. She had a point: there was something of ...”

“... that a combination of factors, including genetic predisposition, is involved, and that onset may be triggered by a virus. Like lupus and myasthenia gravis, two potentially fatal conditions, MS affects more women than men – the MS Society puts the ratio at 3-2. Susceptibility is thought to be partly related to climate: its incidence is much higher in ...”

“... A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain. Eight years on – two years longer than it took to commission and publish the entire series ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”