“... laid to rest. This was the great insight of another of Durkheim’s students, Robert Hertz: the funeral is a ritual not so much of transition as of separation – ending the earthly existence of the corpse. Proper burial and a proper naming of the dead allows them to go in peace, to be forgotten in Nietzsche’s sense that memory depends ...”

“... colleague of de Gaulle’s and a member of the interwar Radical party – to the Panthéon in 1987 may have pleased a broad political spectrum, but hard and less appealing choices followed. In 1989, Marie Curie was rejected as a bicentennial transfer in favour of three Revolutionaries who supposedly represented civil liberty because President Mitterrand did ...”

“... that the commercially-orientated research done by universities, and encouraged by government, may not after all produce any net benefit to the economy: it just drives out research that would have been conducted anyway, and perhaps more efficiently, by the private sector. The more unambiguous benefit of identifying the public research university with its ...”

“... judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”

“... harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be too subjective a sense, to span the period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two ...”

“... let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and ...”

“... me in when he got in first, even taking my hand before shepherding us both past the box-office; he may even have paid.The film had already started, Errol Flynn flirting with Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth while the usherette showed us down the aisle and before we had even sat down the man was pinching me and remarking on my nice chubby legs. This seemed ...”

“... in order.’ Art remains ‘the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced’. You may think he should have been on the side of James, but he allowed his distaste for the pattern – and the style – to persuade him momentarily to accept a substitute for the force and beauty of art, something for which he had, on his own account, expressly ...”

“... regaining ‘the right to manage’. In writing The Enemies Within MacGregor has been assisted by Robert Tyler, late of the tabloid press, but my guess is that the strange mixture of Zane Grey Western and Harvard Business School management-speak which MacGregor’s ghost employs in place of English prose accurately reflects his employer’s mode of ...”

“... to terms with his own sexuality. There are villains: Dr Henderson, Pollock’s Jungian analyst, Robert Motherwell, Clement Greenberg; and heroes and heroines: the sad, remote father, the brothers, particularly Sande, and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee Krasner and without parti pris. My impression ...”

“... in itself ... the political press lost its bearings, its justification and whatever efficacy it may have had.’ Today there is political journalism without party, which Koss compares to ‘Christianity without dogma’. Under the old party managers who created the political press, a journalist was expected to share the views of his employer, but there was ...”

“... cannot put the book down. But sometimes you find yourself turning to a far less agile writer – a May or a Macartney on the Habsburgs, an Otto Pflanze on Bismarck – to understand the context, and to appreciate what Taylor achieved in simplifying it all. Taylor’s two books on the world wars are astonishing feats of clarity and compression. He himself ...”

“... instance, a Neo-Classical design, and, if you view things from the other angle, how much hangs on Robert Venturi producing something authoritative for the corner of Trafalgar Square. W.R. Lethaby was, on the face of it, Richard Rogers’s opposite: clever, always top of his class, and a prize-winning draughtsman. He was born in Barnstaple, the son of Bible ...”

“... become ‘things’: the attempt to remove a terminological distinction between men and women may turn both into an object, as when ‘chairman’ and ‘chairwoman’ are replaced by ‘chair’. Such phenomena are part of the rough-and-tumble of linguistic change and a fair price to pay for legitimate social objectives. My concern is not with the fact ...”