“... brought into cultivation in the years of prosperity. They included most of the downs to the north of Pitton. In the 1920s the villagers were aware of them as miles of dereliction, just over the horizon. It was possible to see the outlines of the deserted fields and even of the plough ridges, for they had been abandoned without even being sown to ...”

“... public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has not yet crested. You could say that by accepting the Kazakh ...”

“... of R.S. Surtees’s genial cast: Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853), lightly illustrated by John Leech, was one of my father’s favourite books, the very mention of it bringing out a rumbling chuckle of pleasure. Brogues also crossed the gender divide and they helped emphasise the newly admired boyish silhouette of the iconic 1920s gel, a tennis player ...”

“... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...”

“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... of ‘common sense’. Gish singles out for praise the ‘precise nature images’ of the ‘North of the Tweed’ section: but the images need to be seen in context, they point beyond immediate perception to the more subtle movements of cosmic processes. But this rejection of the merely concrete, in MacDiarmid as in Shelley, need not be read as simple ...”

“... 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 a sixth-form prize on Speech Day. Here were Scott’s ...”

“... back, Spartacus, Moses and even Robin Hood were played by Americans, while Nero, Pharoah, King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had British accents. To use an American for the hero was only natural, but the hiring of Britons to play a specifically political kind of villain says something particular: namely, that American mythology has quite sharply ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... a rather inconclusive review of the literature on ‘white-collar crime’ by the late John Spencer, and an important critical essay by Paul Hirst on the inability of orthodox Marxism to theorise the joint-stock company. None of these interventions did much to ground their discussion in the developing realities of economic crime in Britain. This ...”

“... of Philip Glass’s Monsters of Grace, ‘a digital opera in three dimensions’ which has toured North America and Europe since it opened last year, says of this work: ‘I’m not giving you puzzles to solve, only pictures to hear.’ Some of the tales that Rée includes within his metaphysics remind us that Western sensibilities, however gross they may ...”

“... and tells me ideally she would vote for a bizarre dream-ticket of Bradley and Republican senator John McCain, who both advocate it. But most are straightforwardly undecided between Bradley and the other Democratic contender and favourite, Al Gore. Bradley arrives, six and a half feet tall and ramrod straight. He walks round the room, shaking hands and saying ...”

“... saved or lost.’ She was sure that the devil is present in creation. She and the novelist John Hawkes had a lot to say to each other about the devil in the course of their correspondence, although in The Habit of Being we get only O’Connor’s portion of this exchange. (The trouble with books like this one is that the reader feels as if he or she ...”

“... nickname of ‘Baldhead’. The Plunket Greenes had links with a very different world from that of North End Road, Hampstead. Mrs Plunket Greene was a niece of Baron Von Hugel, the theologian. A more obvious biographical and psychological puzzle is the effect on Waugh of his First wife’s desertion in the summer of 1929, while Waugh, who had left her in ...”

“... the tremendous pressures of poverty and exploitation in the South into the arena of the North’ – there could emerge a new and far-reaching agenda for reconstruction. Liberalism also was long occluded, but is now again, in name, triumphant. ‘Oblivion, transvaluation, mutation, redemption: each, according to their intuition, will make their own ...”