“... politically correct thought police. Rupert Bear is a racist, offensive character who is poisoning young minds ... Move over Rupert ... there’s more candidates for Nutwood.’ The editors’ first priority is to make all 30 pages of the paper appeal to the punters, but their most important political object is to help the Tories move further to the ...”

“... owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen declares Pynchon a personal hero. David Foster Wallace moves beyond admiration to adulation – if not, to put it more plainly, outright imitation. It is, in fact, a virtuoso performance that has eclipsed its progenitor: Wallace ...”

“... to his home, sounding out his chances of the job and embellished with an arch little story of young Roy saving up the bus fare from Edmonton to visit, and fall in love with, the museum. It is hard to feel much sympathy for either side in this quarrel (though, if you had to choose, Pope-Hennessy’s case is much the more plausible). There is a genuine ...”

“... 1950s, that might have made him a natural Gaitskellite, but this was a role that chafed for a young MP with a reputation for being too outspoken for his own good. Not for him the plan of prudently joining a faction and loyally working within it – still less of disloyally manoeuvring between factions in an adroitly judged pursuit of preferment. ‘The ...”

“... idiotic and unnecessary tennis knick-knacks like T-shirts and caps, there’s the sullen crowd of young pros dressed as walking billboards for Hertz, Movado or Volvo rather than as tea-sipping athletes in white flannels. Even the commentators are pros (some of them, like Cliff Drysdale and John McEnroe, excellent ones). In nearly every way tennis has become ...”

“... In 1931, a particularly venomous attack was launched on Thackeray by Bulwer Lytton’s biographer, Michael Sadleir. Bulwer had been mercilessly satirised by the young Thackeray. It was payback time. The family decided in 1939 to authorise a Life based on the literary remains Annie had preserved (with a little dutiful pruning ...”

“... political edge could be tolerated: anyone who showed any sign of that kind of talent was, like Michael Heseltine, bound to come to grief. By 1987, when the Leaderene had won her third straight election, the Cabinet was stacked with rabbits, nerds and characters with sufficiently low testosterone levels to endure repeated handbagging. Crucially, when ...”

“... political. In 1997, the markets were still bound to be suspicious of the purported prudence of young Brown, let alone the infant Balls, and much readier to trust Steady Eddie. Here, it might be thought, Brown was going for a short-term political gain – buying confidence by hiding behind the Bank. But he was no more ready than Clarke to surrender his own ...”

“... are more likely to find it in Brooklyn or Queens, and the banker’s island paradise that young people leave behind is decidedly less vital without them. Bender makes a strong claim for the role of creative intellectuals in New York’s political culture in his six central chapters. An ambitious essay on ‘Modernist Aesthetics and Urban ...”

“... version of the Brownshirts, the Union Solidarity and Development Association, a mass movement of young people who travel around harassing government opponents. Two years ago, reportedly on a day selected by astrologers, Than Shwe moved the seat of government from Rangoon to Naypyidaw, a small town in the jungle heart of the country, installing the generals ...”

“... from one of the most celebrated books, Atalanta Fugiens, composed in 1617 by the German alchemist Michael Maier. An engraving entitled Nutrix ejus terra est (‘the Earth is its nurse,’ a line from the Emerald Tablet) depicts the Earth as a woman with the globe as her body, nursing a child, while at her feet a she-wolf suckles Romulus and Remus, and baby ...”

“... a substitute for empire, and that was sufficient; likewise his colleagues. As the journalist Hugo Young put it, ‘the deep, existential meaning, for Britain, of getting into “Europe” was not considered.’ No serious thought was given to the implications of accession. In his judgment, ‘ministers did not lie, but they avoided telling the full ...”

“... Finish Ronald Blythe’s The Time by the Sea, an account of the time he spent at Aldeburgh as a young man. It’s uncritical of the regime, adulatory of Britten and Imogen Holst, though more muted about Pears. The fact is Aldeburgh was a court, and whether the ruler is Henry VIII or Benjamin Britten all courts are the same, with the courtiers anxious to ...”

“... frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing’. But his reputation has remained tinged with an almost religious aura. Even his daughter recognises why he might have been described as ‘an ascetic divine’, who ‘with his lean ...”

“... in 19th-century German universities. It had few practical uses, and at a time when all the bright young scientists in Germany were turning to hard-nosed experimental and physiological approaches, it was dismissed as a merely ‘descriptive’ discipline. But even description wasn’t easy. Source materials were scarce, hard to handle, hard or impossible to ...”