“... agency, a department of minerals and a central birth registry. Its motor vehicle authority issued licence plates carrying the IS logo. Its department of alms and social solidarity redistributed wealth to the poor. Its department of health brought in sanitation regulations that stipulated more frequent bin collections than in New York. It wasn’t that ...”

“... the BBC was not and has not been sent to market in the most obvious way – by abolishing the licence fee – people have tended to assume that the transformation which occurred in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s ...”

“... will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s unauthorised Life and Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow, the collateral damage, too, has been heavy. Even now, much about Eliot remains opaque: 13 years after the first volume of his letters appeared, we can only speculate ...”

“... oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s new biography are true, Branson is far from being good. He is playing the same game as his Russian counterparts, but it’s the looking-glass version. Where they do their best to avoid the glare of publicity, he thrives on it. The oligarchs who got ...”

“... or speak on a Virgin mobile. Among these hold-outs, I wouldn’t be surprised, might have been Tom Bower, who tells us that halfway through writing this biography he found himself in receipt of a writ for defamation after an article he wrote in the Evening Standard. One way or another Virgin gets into your life, though Virgin Writs is not, so far as I ...”

“... example for recent converts or nonconformists by fleeing. He was arrested for preaching without a licence at an unlawful assembly, put on trial and sentenced to three months in jail. He wasn’t helped by the fact that, during his trial, Thomas Venner led an insurrection of militant Fifth Monarchy men in London, thus bringing all nonconformists under ...”

“... electronic repair business. He was mugged and badly beaten in 1981, whereupon he applied for a gun licence which was refused – one of the many grievances that increased his feeling of being a loner. Goetz senior, significantly, died a few months before the shooting. There you have it – Tin Man with no heart and little sense of proportion. According to ...”

“... the tyro Wilson of Kindly Light. (It also echoes the current offering of his Secker stablemate, Tom Sharpe, who is into public schools as well.) Alongside Giles’s extreme plight, the school comedy is discordant. But presumably that is another desired effect in this uneasy novel. As used to be said of Thomas Hardy, Wilson turns his screw of misery once too ...”

“... insisted on the truthfulness of her tales should not necessarily cost her her novelist’s licence, since as Susan Morgan observes, ‘there is a long and honourable tradition in English fiction of insisting that a particular book is actually true.’ On the other hand, as Morgan also acknowledges, this particular romance happened to accuse a prominent ...”

“... any of this mattered. The activities favoured by the Souls gave the women of the group unheard-of licence to dispute with men, to be competitive, amusing and intellectually adroit, and to take from it an unguarded pleasure, free from the disabling fear of outside scrutiny. (The Souls also exercised in mixed company: golf, tennis and cycling were all preferred ...”

“... Discoverie of Witchcraft, which Nashe read, is avowedly sceptical, but was published without a licence.) So his mockery of those, including himself, who are ‘benighted in an old wives’ tale of devils and urchins’ (urchins are goblins) has to be balanced by credulity. He starts by finding devils everywhere: in Tewkesbury mustard, in flint, in ...”

“... advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working from a subtext of his own: Hazlitt’s crimes against taste would have included his unapologetic admiration for Milton, and behind that offence lay a consistent choice of affinities. Eliot was a Dissenter who grew to hate ...”

“... to argue, the judge has already decided the case for us.” ’ Fearful that he would lose his licence to practise law in New York State because he got caught stealing from a client, Cohn applied for membership of the Connecticut bar. An associate asked him how on earth he would answer the questions on ethics. Cohn replied: ‘When I take the ethics ...”

“... our libations to the moon.’ Sometimes the narrative wearies of itself. ‘The voice was that of Tom Brown Stevens, an ancient historian of engaging eccentricity, who had come to the groves of Academe from an unusual direction ... The great day found him seated at his host’s right hand, a fountain of wit and well-honed stories.’ But the poems rarely ...”

“... from a world beyond the borders of our expectations. Lily Tomlin is a waitress, for example, and Tom Waits is a working and then an out-of-work chauffeur. Altman thinks highly of their performances, which were ‘so superb’ that he felt the other actors might have trouble in living up to them; but they are actually one of the weak things in the ...”