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“... symbolises everything that is wrong with modern Britain. The cult of the stately home is said to foster snobbery and deference. It makes possible the economic survival of the aristocracy in a supposedly democratic age. It encourages nostalgia for an idealised, rural, paternalist world that never was. It fosters hostility to modern art and a taste for anaemic ...”

“... irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts the petty-bourgeois boot into patrician dons, revealed just what kind of talk remains unacceptable in a ...”

“... John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy grin conceals volumes.) When Updike was but a sprig, apprenticing at the New Yorker and carving out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty ...”

“... on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one solace: the Independent on Sunday would be run by clear-eyed, yet idealistic ...”

“... then, is our confident Continental, once eager to light upon a new entente cordiale that might foster exotic theoretical readings, now faced with a disappointment as cruel as his fantasy has been seductive. Faced, too, with these exiled critics and deconstructors, whose only recourse has been to parade themselves as orthodox academics while remaining ...”

“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison ...”

“... If they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings about Northern Catholics a stage ...”

“... individualism’. Hatch’s thesis is perhaps best exemplified by the Baptist preacher John Leland who, on New Year’s Day 1802, presented to the President, Thomas Jefferson, a 1235-pound cheese bearing the motto: ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.’ When Leland spoke before the Houses of Congress, he was described by one Congressman ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity or guardian spirit: ‘She’s so hidden … she’s definitely one of the aspects of the ...”

“... I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print ...”

“... in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of religion. J.T. Cliffe’s ...”

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

“... an eating insecurity, a covetous desire to earn acceptance and approval from those in authority. John Sutherland points to this paradox as the driving force behind Mary Ward’s extraordinary career. He isn’t inclined to condone the various obstinacies that made ‘The Great Mary’ (Pound’s term) so scorned among the writers who followed her. Her moral ...”

“... from the world. What people forget is how long it was kept up. Reared on books like Richard Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language, students and teachers of English literature, as of English history, tend to assume that if a book isn’t in English then it must be ‘obscurantist, untypical and irrelevant’. By making this unstated ...”