“... even for him to master completely and fruitfully: one of the most absorbingly intelligent men in English letters, he was almost unable to write, or at least to finish, a readable book, and became an alluring but dangerous generator of unfinished theses about his unfinished poems. There are, it has to be said, first-rate scholars and critics at work on ...”

“... and her unstoppable banging on about the beauties of Oz. Hornung evokes the chilliness of the English upper classes with a frisson that suggests he must himself have been on the receiving end. Even her name is unspeakable, Gladys, the shortening to Gladdie worse still. The embarrassment reaches a peak when they go riding in Rotten Row and, in the presence ...”

“... several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now repent ...”

“... morning. There were scores and scores of cars there and hundreds and hundreds of spectators both English and French. Everyone was talking and chatting, when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster, but a very graceful machine, with beautiful lines, lozenge-shaped, but with two clumsy-looking wheels behind it. (These wheels were to be ...”

“... in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who have lost their ...”

“... these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as telephone chat-lines and Asian Babes magazine. We should, however, beware of the temptation to chart a nation’s moral decline through the personalities of its newspaper ...”

“... of the US Federal Reserve in 1972 to raise interest rates and risk a recession that would weaken Richard Nixon’s chances of re-election. When Paul Volcker was made the Fed chair in 1979, he acted without regard for the potential political fallout, raising interest rates to nearly 20 per cent and causing unemployment to rocket; in 1982, it reached a high of ...”

“... dozens of innocent Indians were compelled to crawl on their bellies along the street where an English mission school teacher, Marcella Sherwood, had been beaten up. Dyer claimed that this street, like the well at Cawnpore into which the bodies of the British women and children had been thrown, was ‘sacred ground’. Dyer, like Neill and the equally ...”

“... there are poems that combine curses, doomed love, the sea and the elegy, such as ‘The Death of Richard Wagner’, whose penultimate stanza describes the effect of hearing his music: As a vision of heaven from the hollows of         ocean, that none but a god might see, Rose out of the silence of things unknown of                 a ...”

“... seats to win, but is competitive in fewer of them, because the Tories entrenched themselves in English and Welsh marginals while the SNP piled up unassailable majorities in much of Scotland. According to the Fabian Society, what’s required is something like the vote share Labour achieved in 2001, when, starting from a much stronger position, it won 413 ...”

“... up imminent graduates with good grade point averages. They hired everybody from engineers to English majors, though those with a technical education were put on a starting salary of $27,000 a year; the humanities graduates earned a few thousand dollars less. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Big Six accounting and professional services firms – previously the ...”

“... that thrives on doubt is a crime in itself. Few expert witnesses experience the luxury enjoyed by Richard Hoggart in the Lady Chatterley trial of being able to defend a considered critical evaluation against a hail of middle-class morality. But it is too late to protest: scientists are now regular foot-soldiers in the army of the law, and the conscripts among ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... Medical Officer arrived with the slogans of the Ugandan anti-Aids campaign painted on its doors in English: ‘Love Carefully’, ‘Zero Grazing’. The Medical Officer, and the Chairman of the National Resistance Council both gave speeches in the same vein. Then the local bow-harp ensemble, the Laufori All-Stars, appeared. They had been commissioned to ...”

“... brother James had been on Captain Cook’s second voyage). There is Joshua Reynolds and Richard Sheridan, and later Madame de Staël and Talleyrand. In her ostensibly private records of her life, Burney often keeps pace with current events and personalities, providing the biographer with the background as well as the foreground of a Life. It is as ...”