“... you knew – left or right – was for the war.’ ‘I am not a radical,’ Coates said. Even so he found it ‘searing’ to watch ‘reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster’. In retrospect, the most remarkable of these reasonable people were not the neoconservatives but the liberals – some of them now Coates’...”

“... railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child’s burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s ...”

“... Duncan Sprott’s The Clopton Hercules is an interesting book, powerfully written, and certainly (indeed, remorselessly) clever: but one-tracked, and self-satisfied. It takes a traditional target, the bizarrerie of upper middle-class Victorian sexual behaviour, and blasts away at it with satirical vigour and relish: but the more points are scored, the more pointless the exercise begins to seem ...”

“... an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the facts that there were several collections of Mangan’s poems at large and that his life and work had been extensively written about. ‘Mangan has been a stranger in his country,’ Joyce claimed, ‘a rare and unsympathetic figure in the streets, where he is seen going forward alone like one who does penance for ...”

“... and the obliterating of the evidence of hundreds of lives. At the wedding, the bridegroom’s mother knocks over the punchbowl, sending liquid all over the polished floors. The story can now expire into figurative ellipsis, the mere assemblage of careful parts having done its subtle work of implication and connection. That is my own crude sketch, but it ...”

“... to think, cynically, that the top echelons of the family did this deliberately: support both sides so that whichever faction of the ruling class wins, the family never loses. That was often the case. Not this time. The origins of the family divide, I’m pleased to say as a Marxist, lay in a dispute over land between two brothers in the middle years of the ...”

“... A few weeks ago​ , I took my daughter to MoMA, where the sixty panels in Jacob Lawrence’s 1941 Migration series have at last been assembled in their entirety. As a 23-year-old black painter in Harlem, Lawrence chronicled the experiences of black Southerners who fled the Jim Crow South for the cities of the North ...”

“... Nobody​ has a good word to say about Mabel Loomis Todd. When she’s remembered at all, it’s as a homewrecker: the vamp who seduced Emily Dickinson’s brother, Austin, 27 years her senior, and destroyed his marriage to Susan Gilbert, Emily’s closest confidante ...”

“... breach of constitutional decorum than the insistent lobbying that preceded the reluctant retiree’s decision. Breyer’s liberal allies had the noblest motives for expediting his departure. America’s Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure, and sometimes that is a literal ...”

“... to name anything the Government has actually done. It is also obvious from the Prime Minister’s last couple of speeches that he has seriously lost his bearings. None of this should be a surprise: it was clear from the way Labour fought the last election that it would end up like this. The Government’s problem is that ...”

“... Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful contribution to Britain’s invisible exports ...”

“... in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Review, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James ...”

“... The politics of taxation can sometimes be gripping for a nation’s citizens, but not often: the arguments tend to be too technical when they are true, and too obviously bogus when they are false, to sustain public interest for long. By extension, the politics of another country’s tax system is unlikely to be of much interest to anyone with any sort of normal life ...”

“... partisan politics. Conservative politics are reactive, a poor second best to the conservative’s preferred condition, one of no politics at all. Conservatives organise only when challenged. But whenever one dates the origins of the British party system, whether with the attempt to exclude the Catholic James from the succession to Charles II, with the ...”

“... Westernisation. He is grateful to have completed his wanderings just in time. Unlike Chesterton’s Last Hero, the Last Explorer will not need to cry, at the end: Know you what earth shall lose tonight, what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? A few tales may well remain untold, but the heavy gold (with a certain ...”