“... him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had ...”

“... So there you have it. Christopher Booker, to whom I shall come in a moment, goes further, and means it more seriously: ‘Two unfailing barometers of cultural optimism in our century have been the height of buildings and the height of girls’ hemlines.’ This is not only rubbish but untrue. When the Sears, Roebuck Building went up in 1891 skirts were ...”

“... for the future, but her refusal to accord any real significance to contemporary imperial ideology means that her account of Charlemagne’s last years, and of much of the reign of his son, is ill-proportioned and crude. In fact, Dr McKitterick seems rather suspicious of ideas in history. She spends a disproportionate amount of time telling us of the number ...”

“... to be ‘fundamentally alike’, ‘the same person’, or that being ‘genetically identical’ means that twins will have ‘thoughts and desires’ in common? Because his interest lies not in myth but in science, the modern twin of myth, and the biobehavioural theory that drives contemporary twin studies favours the hypothesis that twins remain similar in ...”

“... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...”

“... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...”

“... into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they failed to spot any danger signals when Dr Bennett’s manuscript came in remains, however, a mystery. For Dr ...”

“... situation grows increasingly serious,’ his tone is not alarmed but exultant. A ‘great war’ means a prospect of liberation, not of indiscriminate slaughter. His other main political concern is with the growing power of the Jews and the rise of Polish anti-semitism. The idea that ‘there’s going to be trouble with the Jews’ is one of the novel’s ...”

“... Zollverein to grip colonial sentiment. Rugby was in part, for South Africans especially, a means of adapting British cultural implantations for the creation of a distinctive and differentiating identity. The alienness of the 1906-7 Springboks was signalled by the fact that, on the field, for tactical reasons, they communicated in Afrikaans. It hardly ...”

“... a plausible and formative life: that version of the Author is dead as a dodo for her. And that means questioning the importance of childhood, and the archetypal, claustrophobic family romance that’s supposed to be so character-forming. Yes, it’s significant that she grew up in various places – born in Geneva in 1923, brought up in Belgium and in ...”

“... a stimulus that elicits an automatic response’, he wrote. ‘You become all attention, which means that you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention … For the cultivated eye, the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating a single word.’ The genius of ...”

“... out of a difficult life is an idea that some moderns have endorsed. In his ‘Essay on Suicide’, David Hume thought it would be strange for God to deny us an option that even a malaria mosquito could inflict; Georges Poulet disagreeably proclaimed that death by one’s own hand is the only act that avoids the twin perils of a meaningless existence and a ...”

“... and roadless places, and corruption and incompetence galore. The current conservative senator, David Vitter, has been mixed up with prostitutes while preaching family values; the Democratic congressman from New Orleans had to resign after he was found to have an unexplained $90,000 in his freezer (in an interesting twist, the disarray he created in the ...”

“... an aversion to making decisions, especially difficult decisions involving confrontation – which means nearly all leadership decisions. In the latter half of both books Corbyn is increasingly absent, and his decisions, when he does make them, are Delphic. He sometimes seems irritated by having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even ...”