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“... to the US was still singling out his term in office as ‘the most fruitful and productive in the post-war years’. This upside to the Nixon picture is much to the fore in Aitken’s adoring biography. It is a strange coming-together: Aitken, the hereditary Tory, born with a large silver spoon in his mouth, and the lower-class Californian Nixon, engaged all ...”

“... The guarantees concerning privacy had literally to be iron-clad. On 1 January 1912, the General Post Office became to all intents and purposes the monopoly supplier of telephone services in the United Kingdom, and remained so until the creation of British Telecom in 1981. In 1912, phone boxes entered public service. They had thereafter to be ubiquitous, and ...”

“... public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor. On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden. In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a ...”

“... of this has changed in our present? It is now said with tedious regularity that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age which radically differs from anything that came before. Sages and hacks alike grumble that postmodernism has formed a toxic alliance with online disinformation to dissolve the secure foundations on which truth, supposedly, once rested.These ...”

“... short on analysis and reflection. If Britain is by German and Japanese standards an inefficient post-industrial slum, our politicians and administrators have no doubt failed to stop it. What is less clear – and it’s a question which Ponting never stops to ask – is whether there was very much they could have done about it, and if so when. Was there ...”

“... of amnesia (or megalomania). The exclusion of Dorothea Tanning as of every other exponent of post-de Chirico Surrealism suppresses a key part of the story. The exclusion of Josef Albers shows bias. The exclusion of Mark di Suvero means the omission of the one artist (David Smith is something else) who has created a sculptural equivalent of Abstract ...”

“... passion into refinement’ and that the discourse of deportment rendered citizens amenable to the post-revolutionary government, keeping both painters and consumers in their places. The chapters focus on social events embodying that discourse: the development of small group portraits (the ‘conversation piece’) in the 1720s, of public pleasure gardens in ...”

“... roots has accordingly not bulked large in arguments over the American Revolution. Now that Jonathan Clark has discovered America, however, religion becomes the centrepiece of an interpretation which banishes all other explanations as anachronistic or incomplete. Clark is the man who put the Tory back into British history with his iconoclastic account ...”

“... Wordsworth’s early poetry has fostered some of the most sophisticated and wide-ranging post-war criticism in English. The three editions of Lyrical Ballads published in the Sixties for use in university teaching furthered this work, and from a scholarly point of view usefully complemented each other: W.J.B. Owen (1967) used the 1798 text, Derek ...”

“... work O.M. Manning, but it was as Olivia Manning that in 1937 she published The Wind Changes with Jonathan Cape. In being acquired by Cape, Manning made an acquisition of her own. More striking than beautiful, with down-turned dark eyes and very slender legs, she was extremely interested in sex, and the more of it she experienced the more fashionably ...”

“... As Diderot himself later acknowledged, ‘we had contemporaries during the age of Louis XIV’ (Jonathan Israel has recently restated this argument in a new form in Radical Enlightenment, focusing on the Netherlands and the circle of Spinoza). Brockliss takes a different tack. He wants to show, first, that the Republic of Letters survived into the late 18th ...”

“... of couples. Kundera regularly gets clobbered for misogyny – or recently, more mildly, by Jonathan Coe in the Guardian, for ‘androcentrism’ – but I don’t think it’s that. If you wanted a word it would be gamogenetic: it’s about couples and coupling. Everyone in his books is a sexual actor or a sexual cipher, the men as much as the ...”

“... Butler’s part, because Blair was already determined to seed his own placemen (Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell) inside the government machine to have it do his bidding. But in fact it seems about right: Blair was scared of the hard work involved in getting the civil service on his side. He was always looking for short cuts. The result was an administration ...”

“... is to swell the payroll vote, and spout stultifying drivel. In 1999, Blair calls to offer Mullin a post as a bottom-ranking minister. First he accepts. Next day he resigns. Blair gets back on the phone. He dangles the prospect of promotion to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select ...”

“... That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life different from any other life.’ Jonathan Franzen did his part in 2010, with a rapturous essay in the New York Times about the same book. ‘I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to ...”