“... it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing. Raymond Williams is taken behind the bike sheds for a particularly nasty going-over; repetition of another kind adds to the problem here, since the substance of this long section was first delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1999 (as the Raymond ...”

“... and mysteriously resigned as Premier. The list, written down by Wilson’s éminence grise, Marcia Williams, on her lavender-coloured writing paper, consisted almost entirely of rich right-wing businessmen who supported the Tory Party. It included the Lord High Buccaneer from Milnsbridge, James Hanson. When Thatcher was returned as Prime Minister in ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... editor. We had a committee consisting of John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, Michael Fried and Gabriel Pearson. We never had meetings or anything like that. There was a lot of correspondence, because John went to Buffalo for a year. So he wrote to me a lot from there. And Michael and Colin had already ...”

“... were unfurled in the national press, while recollections of the happy times of Elgar and Vaughan Williams encouraged proposals that after Sir Michael Tippett, the next candidate for composer-laureate and international standard-bearer should be Tavener. As soon as a young or not-so-young composer in the post-Górecki era ...”

“... by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But the taxonomy is bizarre, as Bernard Williams once complained, since it contrasts a method or approach to philosophy with a geographical region, ‘rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese’. Even the term ‘analytic philosophy’ is misleading. When it came into ...”

“... attribution (the great Joseph wrote only the finale, the rest was by his middling younger brother Michael), and adding the testimony of a German refugee doctor to whom the by now mortally sick Tovey confided his favourite composer (‘he became serious and concentrated on what he was going to say: and he said – “The older I grow, and especially ...”

“... minister, coming third with 56 votes in the Parliamentary Labour Party behind Callaghan’s 84 and Michael Foot’s 90. When Callaghan won on the second ballot (Jenkins having withdrawn), it would have been magnanimous to offer the Foreign Office to the colleague best-equipped to hold it. But Callaghan felt personally uncomfortable with a man whose record at ...”

“... that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, was being taken over by competitive repudiations of Michael O’Halloran, the much put-down Member for North Islington who had come over to the Social Democrats in the company of a considerable contingent of councillors. The timing of the Islington cross-over enabled Liberal speakers to put a name to what gave ...”

“... in the form of a script. Warner’s magic realism is not that of Marquez and Rushdie but of Michael Ondaatje, whose magical images do not require any supernatural explanation. Morvern’s knee sparkles with different-coloured specks because she once slid on her knees and grazed her skin across the glitter of a Christmas card. Lanna’s grandmother ...”

“... Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is cultural, including the Andes ...”

“... bites my hand. As I read this scene, and others like it, I found myself thinking of William Carlos Williams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no question of the necessity of the examination: the child has a potentially fatal ...”

“... the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”