“... things​ in the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of ...”

“... one, within limits. The use of idea-signs, phonetic signs and various combinations of the two, means that early writing systems tend to be complex, with as many as one or two thousand signs, or more in the case of Chinese. They lead also to polyvalency, i.e. using the same sign in more than one function. Phonetic scripts (syllabaries and ...”

“... for dead. The last full-scale history of English literature that anybody has bothered over was David Daiches’s two-volume Critical History of English Literature. When it appeared, in 1960, it was thought gallant but defeated. For a successful history of English from a single pen, we must no doubt go back to Saintsbury, who is still readable. There is ...”

“... the novel power of social media to drum up interest and financial support. His campaign manager David Plouffe liked to say of Obama’s candidacy: ‘Walking a tightrope without a net … That’s when we are at our best.’ Yet when Obama does make a misstep – and inevitably there are plenty, from dismissing Clinton as ‘likeable enough’, to ...”

“... and important of the municipal buildings of the city in which it is placed. It should be the means of giving due expression to public feeling upon all national and municipal events of importance. It should serve, as it were, as the exponent of the life and soul of the city.’ Thus conceived, in terms almost as anthropomorphic as architectural, town ...”

“... of a sort, making the point that BBC English and Received Standard Pronunciation are by no means the only language available to us. Such evidence and such a point offer only a sparse diet for the imagination if they come to us in the medium of stories that labour their messages and signal their punchlines and summarise crucial episodes in stories that ...”

“... for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats – ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men and women both wore smocks, and you could be ‘naked in your smock’. (There was no ‘underwear’, so everyone was naked under their smocks.) People did not take their clothes off to go to bed, but they did ...”

“... of power than their comrades in the national assembly. They were removed only by extra-legal means, the coup in July 1932 that proved beyond reasonable doubt that Weimar democracy was dead. That coup in Prussia was mounted by Prussians, the same figures (Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg) who would later miscalculate so disastrously in their dealings with ...”

“... still considers itself ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary accolade’ (whatever that means), won’t be bestowed until 17 October, and the shortlist isn’t due till mid-September, but the hype began to trundle back in February, when the judges were announced. Whoever wins the Booker takes home £9000 less than the winner of the Orange ...”

“... is a public art it takes on ‘a distinctively democratic character’. Here ‘democratic’ means anything popular, anything that a number of people might talk about, regardless of its content. But there is another meaning of democracy running through the book, and a more exalted one: the collective solidarity and sense of communal life that the utopian ...”

“... A student had decided to write something about London poetry – was there any? He’d toyed with David Gascoyne’s A Vagrant (‘They’re much the same in most ways, these great cities’), but decided that Paris was the principal focus there. He couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen ...”

“... much zest into a feeble allegory. In his excellent critical biography of Tati, published in 1999, David Bellos points out that less than three years before he began shooting the film (in May 1947) the Gestapo still had an office on the main square of Sainte-Sévère. And now American movies and military policemen are the problem?Many of the best scenes in ...”

“... the US as a white supremacist, or Murray Rothbard, who went from paleolibertarianism to promoting David Duke and Holocaust denial – but after a while they are hard to tell apart. It’s difficult to get a sense of which ideas mattered most, which alliances gained real traction, which people knew what they were doing politically and which of them didn’t ...”

“... of Political Thought (1982). For me (born in 1931) and for many of my generation, ‘Fascism’ means a system of government which angers us and reminds us of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. A fear of ‘Fascism’ was quite natural in 1968, that year of wild crowds and top people’s plots. I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you ...”

“... madeira and then puts on ‘a damask night-gown (at that period a loose informal coat, not what it means today) over his long waistcoat and breeches. He has also taken his wig off, revealing that he is shaven-headed to the apparent point, in the poor light, of baldness; and indeed looks like nothing so much as a modern skinhead, did not his clothes deny ...”