“... says, is almost always shorter than bad, and the short is also more memorable, as exemplified by Lord Bacon’s comment on an ambitious political rival: ‘He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbs the more he shows his arse.’ For models Medawar suggests various philosophers and essayists who wrote or still write brilliant prose – but a young man ...”

“... in London during a shopping spree a few days earlier – suggesting that they expected to go home at the end of it. They were not fanatics, but ‘idiots’ who had been ‘sent here to die’. Towfiq Ibrahim al-Rashidi, their leader, came from a well-off family in the shipping business in Khorramshahr, an Iranian port across the Shatt al-Arab waterway ...”

“... Bazargan’s interim government distanced themselves from the students or called on them to go home. The only powerful supporter of the occupation was Khomeini. Through his son, he told the students: ‘You are in the right place. Stay put.’ He gave a fiery speech in support of them. The students then found themselves at the centre of a global ...”

“... DOING? That’s a fun question to ask now. A ringing in the ears, even outside the ears. Oh Lord, I should have known it – we were talking about the Hum. Everything you’d read about in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the X-Files would eventually cover. Was that show bad for us? For our minds? Maybe nine straight years of FEMA LIES ABOUT THE ...”

“... man under his vine: ‘Tonight they will surely come. Armour the leaves, Lock up the tree, Call home the dead and be prepared.’ And Carmi comments: ‘The introduction of the anachronistic telephone into the body of a famous biblical idiom for peace and peace of mind – “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree and none shall ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”

“... feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to ...”

“... plots both of Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh present, in their contrived and melodramatic ways, a deep home truth: that there is nothing demeaning in a woman’s dependence if it involves the equal dependence of her man. When her sister Henrietta finally managed to marry her soldier lover Surtees Cook, in the teeth of their father’s antagonism, Elizabeth Barrett ...”

“... the ANC or Polisario – two groups who have made considerable diplomatic gains – merely drove home the ‘forgotten’ character of the Eritrean conflict. After a few moments, a decisive silence would take hold, followed by a peremptory change of subject or a general dispersal. Over the land itself, a similar vexed silence seems to preside. During periods ...”

“... with Gladstone dead, and Chamberlainite imperialism at its zenith, dangerous schemes such as Home Rule seemed to be off the cards. A valuable radical inheritance was there to be won: Lloyd George was ideally equipped to claim it. As Professor Gilbert shows, land reform – or more crudely, attacks on landlords – constituted the one completely ...”

“... war with East Asia and Sandino is, maybe even was, a Christian. Well, that’s a relief. Thank the Lord for Newspeak. So why not thank the Pope for Lordspeak? It’s a bit the same when we come to Ireland, about which O’Brien writes with deep knowledge and passion. At the end of the day he seems to have swallowed the whole of the Ulster Protestant case. He ...”

“... what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of faction within his party while opportunistically waiting for the ...”

“... Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, in 1635, to tell him ‘once for all, that though I honour you as my lord, yet my love to you is just of the same nature that it is to Mr Payne, bred out of private talk, without respect to your purse,’ or, one might add, to his rank. In 1668, Hobbes was asked his opinion of Martha Taylor, a victim of what we would now call ...”

“... from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza instead of the eight of Don Juan. Auden and MacNeice’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ which ends the book contains the ...”

“... as the ‘father of his people’; on Victoria’s death it was noted that ‘mother’s come home’; and George V was known as ‘Grandpapa England’. And from there it was but a step to seeing the whole of the British Empire as a great global family, with the monarch at its head – a monarch who, from the Thirties, made this sense of family and of ...”