“... his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be left out to achieve such a grand synthesis, or so disquieting a compromise.He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer ...”

“... for the narrator’s habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ...”

“... to describe how institutions work, he can expose the limitations of the revealing anecdote. On 25 May 1811, while Catholic Relief was debated in the House of Commons, every Irish member present was (it seems) intoxicated. It’s not clear why we learn this, rather than anything of the debate, or of what led up to it, or of the franchise more generally. Even ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott ...”

“... The husband represents the conjugal union. He is also personally liable for his own acts whatever may be the system under which the matrimonial property is held. For Dickinson, our lives are Swiss, like watches or legal codes. Everything is staked out for us in the high-precision language of legal draughtsmanship and cultural engineering. According to ...”

“... lure to biographers – judging by his bibliography, Shepherd’s is the tenth so far, which may be a record for a living politician. (Powell himself dismisses all notion of writing his memoirs – ‘like a dog returning to its own vomit’.) Shepherd has included a large proportion of the better known Powell stories, though he omits two of my ...”

“... length and breadth of the British feminist pedigree. British feminist effort between 1860 and 1914 may sometimes seem fragmented, she says, but in reality it concentrated fire from several directions on the same target – male exploitation of the female sex – and gained force from the many-sidedness of its approach. This aspect of Kent’s argument is less ...”

“... with (and even now to require) active state intervention, social reform and higher taxes. Robert Morier even sought to reconcile Free Trade with Empire (an Empire bound together by ties of sentiment and affection rather than by material economic interests). Thus reinvigorated, it had no difficulty in seeing off the fair trade and bimetallist ...”

“... take in these new opportunities to taste ‘the pleasures of the imagination’. Georgian England may now, in our culture’s memory, be associated with ‘order, stability and decorum’, but ‘contemporaries saw their culture as modern, not traditional, an indication that their society and way of life was changing. It was its dynamism, variety and ...”

“... whereas in fiction they really do. The novel has come to feel guilty about this art (the guilt may even be the symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius ...”

“... trading interest, who looked with sympathy on the Parliamentary cause after 1629 (though we may well doubt whether such a cause yet existed), we would expect him to look for evidence of this new alignment in the records of the one company where top City men sat side by side with some of the Parliamentary leaders: the East India Company. But these ...”

“... of the end, which came in Lisbon in 1974. If there was a new beginning, it happened then. Robert Dahl, whom Anderson does not mention, dates the start of what he regards as the most recent of the three great waves of enthusiasm for liberal democracy, the one we’re riding now, to Portugal in 1975. Prompted by these events and a wider ...”

“... for a few hundred feet? How do you explain the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth, and the American Robert Goddard, who pursued the mad ambition of space with rockets that lifted themselves only a few yards, before collapsing under their own contradictions? Even more remarkable are the interlinked stories of the two men who actually took humans into ...”

“... inconsistent with the migrants’ own desires’. Similarly, the folklorists Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin, sent west under the aegis of Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress to record what might be left of the migrants’ musical lore, paid no attention to what the Okies – by now into commercialised country and western music – wanted to hear, play ...”