“... mean. This went with a strong desire – in theory at least – to take military action against a broad range of countries across the world. Two things were particularly striking here: a tendency to divide the world into friends and enemies, and a difficulty verging on autism when it came to international opinions that didn’t coincide with their own – a ...”

“... a fraction of the fraudulent stuff then on the market – was burned at the Excise Office Yard off Broad Street. Newspapers reported that ‘the city for nearly half a mile round was scented by the smell arising from the burning piles of sloe and other leaves forming the British tea.’ The ongoing scandal of what was really in British tea made space for ...”

“... what about the name of the ferry boat? The Duchess M, trundling backwards and forwards across the broad river, between the bustling international container port of Tilbury and Gravesend, the historic sump of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, feels like a subliminal tribute to Thatcher: little visited now, but with persisting memories of the days when she was ...”

“... his biographers in dismissing them in a page or two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the ...”

“... were carefully adapted to the particular interests of their recipients. Some derive from the broad humour of the early Tudor poet and playwright John Heywood, whom Harington greatly admired, but the most spry anticipate the sharpness of Ben Jonson, which is probably why Jonson was keen to dismiss them in conversation with William Drummond as ‘but ...”

“... At any rate, there is a very strenuous blend of women-envy in some of the magazines for men. Richard Wollheim has just finished telling us, in ‘Germs’, his frighteningly good memoir extracted in these pages, about wanting to be a woman sixty years ago. ‘I knew that what I wanted,’ he wrote, ‘was, not so much to have her, though I also wanted ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... had embraced Joyce. He thought of himself as a popular novelist, writing for a well-educated but broad audience. Graham Greene was the reader for Longmans who recommended publication of At Swim-Two-Birds and O’Nolan was ambitious for a Greene-sized readership. He sent a copy of his first novel to the popular novelist Ethel Mannin and ...”

“... not quite fitting for a picture-maker. His courtesies, delivered in an accent bearing traces of broad Devonshire, gave way to long discomfiting silences as he worked his magic with the ‘pencil’, a superfine paintbrush of squirrel’s tail fur. In painting from life, he said, the most important thing is ‘the truth of the line’. Other equipment the ...”

“... Watford and Kingston-upon-Thames are coastal towns, straining to see each other across the broad, deep channel covering London. Sussex, Kent and Essex are mostly seabed. Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and much of Yorkshire have disappeared. Here and there, we imagine a church spire or the top floors of City skyscrapers breaking the ...”

“... lectured in the Fifties, becomes the occasion for an inspirational (if inaccurate) Baedeker of the Broad. Likewise, Inglis seems to be on familiar terms with all his chosen players, seldom allowing a name to pass by without offering a thumbnail sketch. Indeed, the book is a sort of stage, on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but ...”

“... to have felt that voting might be a special case that needed further consideration. However, as Richard Tuck points out in his fascinating new book about the strange hold that the free rider problem has had on political science ever since Olson, such misgivings have not stopped many of his followers from treating voting as the paradigmatic case of the ...”