“... were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering of his tenure in public office. This latter involved no known larceny or perversion of law: Mr Stockman gained ...”

“... writer? Not me, at any rate. The Garden of Eden is studded with provincial delicacies Elizabeth David would be proud of (‘jamon serrano, a smoky, hard-cured ham from pigs that fed on acorns’) and dramatic narratives of eating and drinking that might please M.F.K. Fisher. The book is a sort of domestic novel, a portrait of amour fou and its aftermath in ...”

“... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...”

“... idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one thing, they cast light on the hopes and fears most of us entertain in the face of government activity of all sorts. Realists who ...”

“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... the guiding thoughts of the book is how ridiculous the story makes the Klan look. Time spent with David Duke ‘really feels comical’. ‘We had been making fools out of the Klan all these months.’ How does the man do the infiltrating? In whiteface? Is he a very pale policeman, adept at passing? These are the wrong questions, as it happens, although ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”

“... so well (partly, perhaps, because of his own obsessive motivicism and thematicism), he was by no means insensitive to the orchestra, even though his first instrument was plainly the piano; the lessons learnt from Stravinsky and Copland play their part, but except for certain concertante-piano textures there is no Bernstein ‘sound’ apart from that ...”

“... a substantially different novel. But the novel we now have, the novel we have always had, is by no means easy to interpret or even to describe. In D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World, Kinkead-Weekes suggests a reading against the grain when he points out that The Rainbow could be described as a historical novel: a novel concerned, not with the travails of the ...”

“... lower-middle-class provincial boy with commonplace social aspirations, but with very uncommonplace means of fulfilling them: as he made music, so music made him. True. But the implications of this go largely unexplored. By conquering the oratorio, the symphony and the concerto, Elgar also conquered the court, the country and the Establishment. Music was the ...”

“... observed. ‘Well, he’s left school, hasn’t he?’ demanded my father. ‘ “School-leaver” means some no-hope fifteen-year-old from a secondary modern,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a euphemism.’ She was a well-educated woman, my mother. ‘Pays like a euphemism, too,’ she added. Years of marriage to my father had imparted a Yiddish edge to her ...”

“... question implicit in such predictions: how in practice would the House of Windsor be ended? One means would be Parliamentary legislation abolishing the monarchy: this is not a realistic possibility. Another is that the crowds rise up, storm Buckingham Palace, and bear its occupants off to the guillotine: even in the unhappy and feverish week between ...”

“... more clothing and paid more attention to fashion. Canny silk producers drove this development by means of advertising and what amounted to market research: monitoring consumer taste and putting out brightly coloured new patterns each year. Demand drove up prices – and profits – allowing producers to take even more risks. Sewell, in Marxian ...”

“... Kant and Rawls imply that whatever the answer, it will in the end be a question of geography. Size means extent, and the surface of the earth has natural and social contours which limit the extent of any putative state, no matter how well organised or well intentioned. Something more than a walled city, something less than the globe, a viable state in the ...”

“... especially if it takes a literary turn – avoid consumption altogether. Although Brown is by no means the first to argue that literature can ‘redeem’ the material world from commodification, he does so engagingly, with ingenuity, tact and an admirable breadth of reference. His first move is to turn the tables on Marx’s table-turning. The table which ...”