“... against the view that the appeal of ideologies ought to be explained in economic terms. It may be that both believe that there is no general argument to be had, and that the most one can do is drive Marxists and Whigs out of one position at a time. But both are faced with the awkward question whether the intellectual constructions they attend to ...”

“... case and while they might all rejoice that ‘there will be a place in the globe where Englishmen may be free’ they saw that it came at a terrible price. Franklin was driven out of London. Britain was isolated internationally, trade suffered and men died. The anti-war writers were divided between those like the Radical ...”

“... cats has entered literary mythology – but without lasting success. As Johnson was to say of Richard Savage, another denizen of Grub Street, ‘he was therefore obliged to seek some other means of support; and, having no profession, became by necessity an author.’ The accession of the Roman Catholic James II in 1685, and his deposition in 1688 by his ...”

“... are nowhere near as comfortable as GNER. I’ve never had much time for the spurious populism of Richard Branson: his jolly japes and toothy demeanour can’t disguise the fact that he is a hard-faced entrepreneur. These thoughts recur when we come back from Glasgow the next day and have to travel by bus two-thirds of the way (‘track repairs’) and with a ...”

“... to London in 1844, he tried to play on his hosts’ anxieties: ‘Turkey is a dying man. We may endeavour to keep him alive but we shall not succeed … I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly ...”

“... they are not participants in its troubles. Even President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (about whom Richard Gott has recently written in the LRB) has done no more than strike an occasional ‘Bolivarian’ populist attitude. Few countries in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international wars, which ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... of theoretical bids, then the expectant pause just below the low estimate. Well, I thought, I may as well start things off, and clicked on the ‘bid’ button. And waited; and waited. But I was the sole bidder, and the auctioneer was duly grateful to me. I was filled with a prideful exultation: uxoriously, I had completed my wife’s collection.I ...”

“... of a decade, one worldview was seemingly discredited and another took its place. While historians may baulk at the tidy chronology, the idea that there was during this period a paradigm shift in capitalist regulation has proved seductive, and scholars in many fields have busied themselves describing how the ideological wheel turned. An enormous amount of ...”

“... right hand, the triumphalist tone returns in the final pages of The American Century: Reagan may have presided over the largest peacetime expansion of the military budget in American history and then imagined that the Soviets and Americans could unite behind his Star Wars Strategic Defence Initiative ‘to repel invaders of Earth from other ...”

“... shelves. This came as a shock – I’m still not sure why Marsh escaped me then, except that she may have seemed in some mysterious way more of a grown-up taste than Dorothy L. Sayers or Christie – but being a completist I settled down last year to read all of her books, in chronological order. And then I read or reread two hundred or so by other writers ...”

“... the National Gallery in London. There are also new private collectors of Old Masters (Jeff Koons may be one of them). No mention is made of the changing market in ‘Modern’, which has in recent decades expanded to include a reappraisal of ‘Modern British’ – an area in which dealers, curators and collectors practise discrimination of a kind rarely ...”

“... only the description of the dog is given as a quotation (I’m not quite sure why; I suppose there may be spaniels who don’t look lugubrious). However, when I pursued the incident to its source in the published version of Spender’s journals, I found none of the detail of the earlier accident, merely a mention that the car-door incident ‘brought to mind ...”

“... photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol ...”

“... agreement that the essential structure of all civilisations is at breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. The seer is Hannah Arendt, in the 1950 preface to The Origins of ...”