“... roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately preceding the effective one; by which means the key-note of the jest or sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of his embargoed voice, was delivered with the force of a pistol shot’. Lamb was able to practise what he preached.Lamb’s feel for what he called ‘the ...”

“... in this role. You know – take a look at my sensibility which is surely superior to yours. By all means clatter off to your games, you muddy fools. In truth, of course, I envied them because that was the real poetry, so far as I was concerned.Still is, perhaps.Yes, still is.At your school did you write general essays, as part of the English course? We used to ...”

“... a level playing field of opportunities.’ We know, or think we know, more or less what the phrase means. It’s a way of saying that everyone should have a chance to compete on equal terms from the start, without things being tilted either against them or in their favour. But language carries its own histories, which come to bear without our intending or even ...”

“... anarchy of capitalist society’ and called for a ‘socialist economy’ in which ‘means of production’ would be ‘utilised in a planned fashion’.None of us would say that sort of thing any more. Enthusiasm for comprehensive economic planning collapsed following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it had already been eroded by ...”

“... the message seems clear: if you want to escape the knife, get designated ‘excellent’ by any means possible. And since the criteria of excellence often come down to nothing more than financial expediency, it is not surprising that new rites of self-designation and cargo-cult behaviour should be emerging within the anthropology of academic life. Rather ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... Government turned when the Iran/Iraq War broke out in 1980. Trade was controlled under the Act by means of export control orders issued by government and policed by customs officers. It was quickly announced that no lethal weapons would be licensed for export to either side. Even in these early days, weaponry was thought more likely to be lethal in the hands ...”

“... to survive. Thousands burned to death, trapped below deck. Yet their lives at sea were by no means awful. They went to many countries, in East Asia, the Middle East, even South America, and they got to know some of the women who lived in those countries. Boredom bred a desire for a bacchanal, and the Sylhetis were just as motley and secular as their ...”

“... Also, Critchley has written more than twenty books on subjects as various as suicide and David Bowie; this must mean something. But when I began to read, I knew I was in danger, for this was Philosophy.No, I was not the right reader, then, for I am more certain of the parameters of mysticism than philosophy, at least as it is practised by those who ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of ...”

“... the Canadian forests. He talks to Mayor Larry Campbell of Vancouver, and also to the extraordinary David Soares, district attorney of Albany, who has set out to reverse New York State’s Rockefeller Laws, which impose ferocious penalties for possession of minute quantities of drugs. The point here is that Canada is inclined to decriminalise, while the US ...”

“... music needed is what one might call ‘light-serious’ or ‘serious-light’ music. It is by no means easy to find the right idiom for such music. It should be primarily melodious, and the melody would be clear and simple without, however, becoming repetitive or trivial … the same applies to the technique, the form – it too must be clear and simple, but ...”

“... William Ferguson. But if the softer, gentler Trevor-Roper outlived many – though by no means all – of his foremost adversaries, their pupils and heirs had not forgotten the scars borne by the previous generation. In his battle with Trevor-Roper over matters of recusant history, the ‘convert-novelist’ Evelyn Waugh had offered some barbed ...”

“... question. Kermode invites us to pause over the elaborate social coding of Annan’s description of David Eccles as ‘a Wykehamist with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’ – but also over the blunter evocation of Richard Hoggart as ‘the grammar school extramural lecturer’. Our Age had its traditions, ‘was a gentleman’, as Kermode ...”

“... book will undoubtedly become the standard account of the Russian aspect of the Napoleonic wars. David Bell has recently argued that Napoleon introduced ‘total war’ to Europe. Following the 1789 Revolution, all male Frenchmen, on reaching a certain age, were called up as citizens to the armed forces. As a result of the levée en masse the French army ...”