“... Manchester Guardian to write 12 articles on the impoverished areas of Galway and Mayo administered by the Congested Districts Board, but the articles, published in June-July 1905, were pretty innocuous. He wanted to see the local conditions improved, provided the peasants stayed as aesthetically winsome as they were: but he hated the few people who were ...”

“... and the Welfare State. A somewhat flowery way of putting it, perhaps: but then it can certainly be argued that the Welfare State is the principal flower in the post-war blossoming of Western Europe. Moreover, the speaker presumably intended to place the modern Welfare State among the greatest achievements of European civilisation, an order transcending ...”

“... their dole money. Lesser cynicisms will melt into larger ones. And besides, few people will be prepared unequivocally to defend the record of the Schools Council. It was set up in 1964, a gentler time, by Sir Edward Boyle, and its brief was then, and has, in a variety of manifestations, remained, the combining of ...”

“... turn into the subject of a single article. How Eisler and Henze hang together need hardly be explained: but ‘poles apart’ would be a misleading metaphor for them, on the one hand, and Cooke, on the other, for the North Pole and the South Pole have more in common. Amusingly enough, Eisler’s ambivalently beloved ...”

“... for a start, are some nuggets of the old and the new New Journalism. What do they have in common? By now, 1967, with more than a hundred combat missions behind him, Dowd existed in a mental atmosphere that was very nearly mystical. Pilots who had survived that many games of high-low over North Vietnam were like the preacher in Moby Dick who ascends to the ...”

“... since it was then, in 1783, that the independence of the United States was formally recognised by the European powers. Stendhal made his appearance 34 years later, when a travel guide to Italy was published in Paris as the work of ‘M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie’. Had that pseudonymous cavalry officer, Beyle in real life, perished in the retreat ...”

“... blackest depths of the water. Housekeeping is the story of these two children, brought up at first by their silent, orderly grandmother; then for a brief spell by two tottering great-aunts; at last by Sylvie, their mother’s sister, summoned back from some circumambient void to take on ...”

“... The first ‘poems’ by Clive James I can remember seeing were in fact song lyrics written to go with the music of Pete Atkin. I call them ‘poems’ because that’s what Clive wished them to be called. In fact, I’m not sure what they were: highbrow lyrics or lowbrow verse? Set to music, they sounded more or less OK, but ‘on the page’ they seemed sentimental and pretentious – endearing if you happened to like Clive, but almost embarrassingly overanxious to establish that the pop mode could accommodate a finely-educated literary talent ...”

“... Fifteen years later, Nabokov’s father, in flight from the Bolsheviks, is accosted on a bridge ‘by an old man who looked like a peasant in his sheepskin coat’. The old man, Kuropatkin, asks for a light, and the artist comments: ‘Whether or not old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, is immaterial. What pleases me is ...”

“... defends a certain view of society and politics, a liberal view, in terms of which these vices can be ordered and understood. The connection works in the other direction, too: if you think that cruelty, for instance, is more important than other vices, that will already lead you in certain political directions. Judith Shklar, like her heroes Montaigne and ...”

“... 1509 to 1603, 1660 to 1690, and 1715 to 1790; and if the Treasury and private donors continue to be kind, the identity, interests and influence of MPs in this country will be chronicled from 1386 to 1832 and possibly (and desirably) up to the present century. Devotion to the legislature on this heroic scale has a ...”

“... What became of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners ...”

“... Aristocracy have been connected with Burke’s Peerage. One doesn’t expect genealogists to be particularly indulgent: their job, after all, is to separate the sheep from the goats. But these two are soft-hearted and broadminded to a fault, or so social historians, as well as some of their subjects, might think. They draw the demarcation-line between ...”

“... seem to consist almost wholly of last-minute additions. The way out of the impasse brought on by the decay of religion available to Wilson was an authorised version of Ruskin’s symbolic correspondence, authorised by duplicated evidence from the distant past excavated by science, and ...”

“... a story after all. Benjamin’s reasoning runs thus: the story (the only current example would be the dirty joke, I imagine) has no identifiable single author and is transmitted face to face. It rises from the common anonymous stock of oral recitation and intimate social exchanges. Unlike the novel, it is not immutably fixed in form: nor is it a negotiable ...”