“... Last May​ , I was invited to the Ministry of Justice to take part in a discussion of ‘Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation’ (Slapps): legal cases whose purpose is to harass, intimidate and silence public criticism. I was ushered into a small, airless room with a group of other journalists and civil servants ...”

“... If I’m not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly, and if I am worth it and you don’t do it then – you might go there.  The whole business is too stupid and too beastly to go on writing about it so – L.W.Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell:During the last week I have thought ...”

“... of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many ...”

“... insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by writing’. Robert Bresson said much the same thing: ‘Cinema is not a spectacle. It’s a kind of writing.’ There is a wonderful, casual-seeming evocation of this thought in Daney’s essay from 1969 on Pasolini’s Teorema. He says we know what the desert at the end of ...”

“... The Mirror is cracked and the images confused. It is part of the history of the British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up in the North of England forty years ago, the press was an honourable estate. At the centenary of the birth of C.P. Scott, The Making of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was an ideal anthology for ...”

“... when ‘each church recognised the catholicity and independence of the other.’ No easy matter. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in Old Catholics and Anglicans about the difficulty of trying to be both catholic and independent. But that is what Baxter claimed to be – and thought the Church of England should be. N.H. Keeble has ...”

“... of historical detection on this scale from which they are not exempt. A fresh and inquisitive eye may on occasion observe something which those more familiar with a subject have missed, but where a highly complex topic, such as the history of the Knights Templar or of Christian origins, is got up for a specific purpose, with the research carried out, as it ...”

“... her Art in 1939. The fact that Burrows writes like Austen herself is splendid. But other people may write well, and not get the much smaller sums they ask for, so it’s worth considering why those who put our money into this project seem so triumphantly vindicated. English literature is an academic discipline that has grown ever more numerous and ever more ...”

“... receive an annual salary of £20,000. He later became Lord Howe. Peter Walker’s resignation in May 1990 was followed by an explosion of career activity. He took directorships with the Welsh off-shoot of N.M. Rothschild, the bank used by the government for the sell-off of British Gas, and with British Gas itself, at a salary reported to be in the region of ...”

“... not of God but of anti-God.’ Such clear demonstrations of the inefficacy of state atheism may well prove that without God people act badly. Clearly, he is right about this totalitarian Godlessness. But his desire to absolve Nazism of any Christian involvement is inaccurate, and undermines his testcase. Did ecclesiastical anti-semitism have absolutely ...”

“... to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared the same dryness of wit and much the same ...”

“... and a good housewife’. In other words, Carrington is open to the idea that Kipling’s version may be intensely subjective – not the same thing as a lie – but this openness does not send him off into Seymour-Smithian suppositions about Harry Holloway, the son, ‘doing things’ to Kipling at night or about the depiction of Auntie Rosa (Mrs ...”

“... are in the pictures; the accompanying text is workmanlike, informative and plain. ‘Children may not alter,’ say the authors, ‘but their expectations may do so,’ and, no doubt, by the early Victorian period, knowing young readers were looking askance at the nursery homilies tolerated by the previous ...”

“... I usually do is get two or three months’ research under my belt before I go to see the guy. He may say: ‘I don’t want this biography.’ I say to him: ‘That is not one of your options. This book is going to be written, I have a publisher and I’m getting near being able to write something. Your two options are you co-operate with me or you ...”

“... can come up with ‘O Grandfather, Real Spunk’. This is not incorporated into the production. 13 May. Colin H. and I are chatting on the pavement when a man comes past wheeling a basket of shopping. ‘Out of the way, you so-called intellectuals,’ he snarls, ‘blocking the fucking way.’ It’s curious that it’s the intellectual that annoys, though it ...”