“... to the Orchestra was as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk songs sounded a bit old and a bit new, or a bit English and a bit Continental. Palatable modernity: a good postwar flag ...”

“... largely concentrated on the amount graduates might pay and on which social groups may gain or lose by comparison with the present system. In other words, the discussion has focused narrowly on the potential financial implications for the individual student, and here it should be recognised that some of the details of ...”

“... those elected as Lib Dems or Conservatives, imagined that five days after the election there would be a Con-Lib coalition government, even though Nick Clegg had hinted during the campaign that such an outcome was in his mind. The election result itself was one of the oddest in recent memory. Although the Conservatives won more votes than any other party and ...”

“... What is ‘national history’, and what is it for? Who and what should be included in it? And where does it take place? For all that it may appear to offer a uniquely intelligible account of a clearly demarcated political and geographical space, national history is intrinsically problematic. Territorial and maritime boundaries are usually porous ...”

“... Of the dozen or so people who have declared or are thought likely to declare, every one can be described as a full-blown adult failure. These are people who, in most cases, have been granted virtually every imaginable advantage on the road to success, and managed nevertheless to foul things up along the way. There is, for starters, George’s younger ...”

“... his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with David McDuff’s new translation of The Idiot and some other holiday books. When I say I want to write about Himself Alone, he exclaims: ‘A thick brick like that! I ...”

“... What exactly is book history? Literature students consulting their reference libraries would be hard put to find an answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms or Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D ...”

“... voicing the grievances of the common people against the pampered liberalism of an elite typified by John Kerry, though both Bush and Kerry were educated at Yale, and both – creepily – belonged to the Skull and Bones. It is not altogether fanciful to view Bush as the accepted voice of underprivileged, blue-collar America. On the other hand, the ...”

“... Aron is a psychologist who has discovered that blood-flows in the brains of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage resemble those of new lovers. Romance may authentically survive: ‘That’s what the brain scans are telling us. People can’t fake that.’ ‘Brain-Scan Lie Detectors Coming in Near Future,’ runs a news story, cued ...”

“... the world as it existed, without the comforting delusion that answers to every problem could be found by sifting through the sacred texts time and again. ‘Everything remains to be done,’ Sartre insisted. ‘We must find the method and constitute the science.’ This science would ...”

“... in which she tried to establish ‘a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes’ by noting down ‘what kinds of experience made me happy’. The method was: (a) to pick out those moments in my daily life which had been particularly happy and to try to record them in words. (b) To go over these records in order to see whether I could ...”

“... Tolstoy found that the ‘dialogues are impossible and entirely unnatural … I was surprised by his sloppiness, artificiality … so awkward … outright unartistic.’ Nabokov used it as an example of bad style: ‘Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humour, but, alas, with wastelands of literary ...”

“... page of a 1922 copy of Tages-Anzeiger said.At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed elsewhere to a degree, but in Switzerland were endemic in more than 80 per cent of the country. It was a curse that had a mark: the goitre, a bulge of flesh protruding from the front of the neck, sometimes ...”

“... reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was attributed and subheaded under a theme. Then the notes were filed in groups. Scholarly prestidigitation allowed the pages to ...”

“... from the 11th-century Rajputs whose conversion to Islam began a hundred years later, boosted by intermarriage with the offspring of marauding Muslim adventurers from the North. It was completed two centuries before the Mughals arrived. The head of the clan had the right to keep ten thousand men under arms. By the mid ...”