“... I had that Terry Waite in the back of the car once. Unlike the celebrity fares picked up by Private Eye’s proverbial taxi-driver, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy was technically occupying the front passenger seat. But such were the dimensions of legate and vehicle – the one broad yet gangly, the other originally designed by the Germans to give a thousand years of ergonomic motoring – that my companion seemed to be resting the crown of his head against the rear de-mister ...”

“... The reviews and the hype hadn’t prepared me for Malcolm X at all. I expected it to be dull and worthy, a straight and long-winded retelling of a famous life. I found it lively, pretty dramatic, not all that much too long. It is a glossy parable of the sinner who came to virtue, found fame and power, was threatened and killed: the work, death and glorification of St Malcolm Martyr ...”

“... more as an extra club than as a legislature, with the result that its debates were so brief as to be scarcely worthy of the name. In addition, the acoustics of the place were so bad that one member described addressing their lordships as ‘like speaking by torchlight to the corpses in a charnel house’. Reporters in the ...”

“... a reluctant concession to us.’ A typical example of the way Israel exploits America is provided by the saga of the Lavi aircraft. To secure American agreement to this hare-brained project in 1982, Israel assured America that the planes would be solely for Israeli use. Yet early the following year the Israeli Aircraft ...”

“... so on. The other takes it towards material for material’s sake, towards the pebble which lives by its pebble-ish nature alone. Nicholas Penny’s book shows how these forces are reconciled. Materials bring meanings with them. Not even the most resonantly-named dyes and pigments (‘vermilion’, ‘ultramarine’, ‘indigo’) carry as much baggage as ...”

“... the growing trend among both politicians and academics to prescribe what historical study should be: how it should be organised and conducted, what it should be about, why it should be pursued at all. Such prescriptions can sometimes stem from genuine ...”

“... the recent meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod occurred during an impromptu speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Robert Runcie was speaking against an amendment urging the Church to delay re-submitting its Clergy (Ordination) Measure to Parliament until ‘after the next Parliamentary General Election’. The point at issue concerned not ...”

“... age – but all ages are insane, he would say – and offers not hope but whatever comfort is to be found in lucidity and scepticism. Johnson was born in 1900 and died in 1976; he won the Nobel Prize in 1974. He edited an underground magazine in Sweden during the Second World War, but lived in France and Germany for much of his life. Part of his novel is ...”

“... me dizzy.’ Brooding malign silences wind the tension to breaking point, and are punctuated by sudden eruptions of violence: it is a survivalist world, bleak and uncompromising – the world of competitive chess. John Healy arrived there, without papers or proof of identity, a drowning man coming up for the last time. It was his only way of escaping ...”

“... like critical legal studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its operation, but ...”

“... have almost all endorsed this view, and the history of Poussin’s critical fortunes can be read as an elaboration of the sculptor’s telling gesture. The 17th-century critic Bellori noted that Poussin had the ‘most prized gifts of intelligence’. A few years later, the Comte de Brienne said of him that he ‘was endowed with a great deal of ...”

“... 1859, was ‘an excursus in technology’, and he went on to survey all kinds of pens including, by a convenient extension of the word ‘pen’, ‘printer’s type, the pen of civilisation’, ‘the electric telegraph, the world’s shorthand pen’, and the chisel, ‘by which cathedrals and Sebastopols are written in ...”

“... I replied. ‘Oh, Christ!’ she said, and handed it straight back, as if it might still be charged with danger. I have spent much of my time in Colombia over the last five years. Only once have I experienced anything like danger. It was during the Drug War, when a bomb went off in the next street. I had called at a friend’s flat to collect ...”

“... in its own destiny in this respect. Its peculiar saving mission, that of liberating mankind by means of the creation of wealth, would make little sense without some underlying faith in the prospect, perhaps even the certainty, of limitless improvement. The author of The Idea of Progress in 18th-Century Britain, an interesting and carefully crafted ...”

“... In the summer of 1975 I was invited by a man I knew had contacts in MI5 to have lunch at the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge. He wanted me to meet ‘someone from the office’ who had a story which might interest the Sunday Times, where I was then working. There was another guest, an aristocratic young man from the City whose role appeared to be that of prompting the MI5 officer – for that is what I took the man from ‘the office’ to be – when he hesitated over a real or pretended indiscretion ...”