“... by storm. Her new manager is the teen-wrangler Louis Walsh, who can be seen making and breaking young hopefuls every Saturday night on the television show Popstars: The Rivals. Out of her troubles – and the overcoming of her troubles – Lulu has become poster-girl for a new generation of the enduringly ambitious. Her latest album went straight into the ...”

“... Faithfully’ (‘Sincerely’ only after a named ‘Dear’ – I learned that very young), after which I squiggled an elaborate signature that bore no relation to the alphabet. In the space between I let my fingers run riot over the keys, to produce a gobbledygook body of the letter that probably made as much sense to me as most of the real ...”

“... response. The same appropriation, however laced with self-criticism, continues through novels like David Leavitt’s While England Sleeps and films like Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom. Franco’s rule had the effect of marginalising the country culturally, in a sort of mutual boycott punctuated by skirmishes and scandal (Buñuel, for instance, tentatively ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... usual late 18th-century itinerary for polite travelling and collecting was the Grand Tour, but the young Banks had a different idea. (‘Every blockhead does that,’ he said. ‘My grand tour shall be one round the whole globe.’) At Eton, he had discovered a love of botany (as one does). He followed Linnaeus’s new programme of systematic ...”

“... the red hat which I’d always thought by Carpaccio, but isn’t now, and also the Portrait of a Young Man by Baldassare Estense. I don’t care for Cosimo Tura, whom I usually find a sinister painter, the flesh and aspect of the living no much different from that of the dead; still, I like his funny little Pietà with the Virgin looking at the wounds in ...”

“... of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it is the Labour Party, and specifically its left wing, which suffers most severely from myths about a golden past now lost in the mists of time. Even quite well-read Labour politicians are prone to the belief that This Great Movement of ...”

“... if controversial’, although, as I see it, justice could be done to them only by a writer like David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. It seems evident to me that their work is for the most part based on a very small element of truth whose significance is inflated out of all proportion, that facts buttressing the case are carefully selected, and all the evidence ...”

“... large,’ she wrote to one of her ‘pansy’ friends. Lady Q was, of course, her sister Diana, a young woman with a small child and a not-yet-weaned baby. Nancy went in person to the Home Office to inform Gladwyn Jebb, then Under-Secretary of State, that she considered Lady Mosley to be ‘dangerous’. It is a wonder that, while she was about it, she did ...”

“... what its title suggests, depicting a brief, intense and bitter affair between a scientist and a young woman in Prague. It is a tightly-constructed and sharply realised work which, like Greene’s The End of the Affair, charts the course of an ultimately destructive relationship, more of an ordeal than an affair, and tries to make some sense of the ...”

“... entirely consistent with the New Liberalism of the years when Tawney, Beveridge and Attlee were young. The underlying conviction was that the small cost in individual liberty was outweighed by the larger gain in collective equality – a gain without which, indeed, individual liberty was virtually meaningless to those of the population to whom the ...”

“... stories in this book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly ...”

“... legal education in Britain today. We are told that from their ‘first days at law school’ our young lawyers are taught that civil liberties in this country are ‘protected by the common law’ and that ‘their violation has been the fault of Parliament’. The hero of the story, law students learn, is an ‘independent judiciary’, standing steadfastly ...”

“... or ‘feline’. And while the animal is a symbol for simplicity when young and a synonym for simple-mindedness when old, it nevertheless shows signs of psychological disturbance when fleeced. As with all specialists, it is clear that Ryder is drawn magnetically to everything appertaining to sheep. This is manifest in the 27 pages ...”

“... after a glucose injection ...’   ... extracts of testes prostate and seminal vesicles of young bulls ... [were] indicated for all types and consequences of genital hypoplasia (the excessive smallness of an organ) ... But according to Professor Schenk [who testified ‘recently’: some of these people are still with us], ‘no specific effect was ...”