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“... one of Barnes’s many frighteningly sensible women points out to the narrator, Christopher Lloyd, that the attraction of the idea of fast-forwarding to a sprightly 65 might have something to do with fearing the responsibilities of adult life – a fear that he eventually overcomes. Jean Serjeant, thanks to a loveless postwar marriage, is similarly ...”

“... of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a lord mayor.) He was tall and, if not quite clean-cut, skinny. He looked as if he would converse by shuffling his large feet and muttering ‘Aw, shucks’. (Thus kids muttered in novels of the period. What they said ...”

“... King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have Michael Howard. Though he has grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford ...”

“... and gigantic spiders. The whole confection is a muddled, grotesque piece of Germanic romanticism. John Woods’s beautifully lucid translation often emphasises the book’s mock profundity by its very clarity. At the heart of it is the contrast between Ovid’s and Ransmayr’s metamorphoses, pointed up by a 25-page ‘Ovidian Repertory’ of comparisons ...”

“... on his own Confessions to Frances Stevenson’s account, from the standpoint of his mistress, of Lloyd George’s many fibs; and the theologian William Paley’s plea for ‘falsehoods that are not lies’. He gives us Casanova and Kim Philby, Shere Hite on faking orgasms, and Bernard Shaw on the need to lie to children. The publishers tell us the editor has ...”

“... paying a price for it in the form of global warming, acid rain and so forth. Over a century ago, John Ruskin was arguing that Cartesian (‘modern’) thought had destroyed man’s reverence and wonder in the face of the external world, and that the death of God-in-nature would eventually bring the end of nature. Gore’s book is squarely in this ...”

“... that his near invisibility sustained his authority and he never sought the limelight, but as John Macnicol points out in a brief but sharp entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for two decades his word was, almost literally, law: ‘In the interwar years no policy proposal could proceed to legislation without the actuary’s ...”

“... An honest review of the record casts the British naval leadership in a very poor light. As David Lloyd George explained in his memoirs, ‘before the War, the Board of Admiralty had concentrated so much on big and still bigger ships that they neglected essential weapons like mines, armour-piercing shells and torpedoes – all of which were inferior to those ...”

“... itself is a scandal. Their disapproval of the honours system must be taken for granted. John Walker is presumably more open-minded, and willing to speak as he finds, though what exactly an enquirer finds must depend on his general perspectives. ‘This book started,’ we are told, ‘as an article for Labour Research.’ Walker spent five years in ...”

“... Gaudi in Barcelona, Wagner and Hoffman in Vienna, Guimard and Horta in France and Belgium, Frank Lloyd Wright in the US – of which he finds Clough, and the AA generally, unaware. I am not at all sure, either about the unawareness or about this ferment being the only one available. After all, Clough was plumb in the middle of the excitements of the Cottage ...”

“... Marcuse’s 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence of ...”

“... Salvidge and Sir Thomas White. Even Labour followed the example thus set, in the person of John Braddock, a founder member of the Communist Party who lapsed into respectability. Perhaps one should include his wife Bessie in the list. Equally special was the composition of the Liverpool electorate in its changing form. Religion, or, as Waller’s title ...”

“... to labels, rather than by intellectual examination of ideas’. As such it was, of course, heir to Lloyd George’s Inquiries, in the 1920s; its personnel might still have been Liberals had the Liberal Radical tradition survived. Whether social-democrat Tories, in the Harold Macmillan mould, academics or bureaucrats, or liberal men of business and finance, the ...”

“... tribute is to Asquith, whom he knew well and admired deeply, at least as deeply as he detested Lloyd George. It may be that the expression of antipathy is a better test of style and temper than eulogy. MacCarthy has a piece on Disraeli that would surely have been impermissible in a dedicated Liberal of a later generation. He finds it absurd that anybody ...”

“... The state has been heavily engaged in the regulation of industry ever since 1915, when Lloyd George set up the Ministry of Munitions. The facts about the relative industrial performance of Britain have been repeatedly demonstrated in every decade since then, but no government has managed to find the cure. Why, then, should the blame not fall ...”