“... The 1983-84 series of Reith Lectures was given by Sir Douglas Wass, who retired from the Civil Service in March 1983. He had served in the Treasury since 1946, and had been Permanent Secretary to the Treasury since 1974. The task which he set himself in the lectures was to examine the efficiency and responsiveness of central government in Britain ...”

“... shaggy black hair, gaunt and even hungry-looking, tightly wrapped in a coarse overcoat. It might be some Siberian exile, a Panslav mystic, a fanatic ready to hurl a bomb at the head of some ruler. Or a poor wretch spurned by the poets’ clique and hounded by the critics. And yet, with ...”

“... with a sickening sensation, As of a skier on a slope too steep, That if the soundest firms owned by the nation Are flogged, the duds are all we’ll get to keep – And when the auction ends they’ll sell the hammer. We’re heading downhill faster than Franz Klammer. On that one deal the public’s out of pocket Some umpteen million quid or ...”

“... turn away from dealing with large issues? Mary McCarthy’s 1980 Northcliffe Lectures begin by asking such questions with verve and elegance. Perhaps, she thinks, it is all the fault of the old maestro Henry James. As a critic, and even more as a practitioner, he got the public used to the doctrine of the novel as fine art, ‘a creation beyond ...”

“... In its own small sphere, the destruction by Express Newspapers of the Beaverbrook Library must rank as one of the worst acts of intellectual vandalism in recent years. No one who had the privilege of working there during its brief existence in the late Sixties and early Seventies will ever forget it. There, instantly accessible in their sliding metal racks, were the Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Beaverbrook and other papers; on a quiet day, when one was trusted, one could actually get out one’s own files ...”

“... what it is to live the life of a person was a frustrating, painful experience. Perhaps it can best be summarised by saying that while the book goes to great lengths to ensure precision in the second decimal, it leaves us in the dark about the first. Wollheim has a marvellously knowledgeable and intelligent mind. Of the ...”

“... In any century feelings of superiority about the one before are accompanied or succeeded by feelings of nostalgia, even envy. Fifty years ago we laughed at the Victorians: now we wish we could be more like them. They made life more exciting for themselves than we do. They made sex far more exciting ...”

“... are contemplating taking their talents to the Land of the Free. And they have been preceded there by several others in the past few years. British philosophy appears to be packing up and moving across the Atlantic. Neither is this minor exodus being compensated for by American ...”

“... Looking back over more than fifty years of publishing, I count myself lucky to have begun by working for Constant Huntington, chairman of Putnam, a Bostonian of soldierly appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met ...”

“... Ulysses, lies in calling attention to the fact that most of the problems of nationality are caused by people wandering about. For example, the trial of the other Joyce – William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw – demonstrated that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes ...”

“... are circuits, but he seems to know their direction in advance; she is wilder, more willing to be fey or crazy in a cause she doesn’t claim to understand. To Thwaite, poetry is a naming of parts; to Dickinson, the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth ...”

“... is a new dawn over the hill, that, before our very eyes, ‘things are improving’ – only to be contradicted by some even more authoritative voice, although it hardly needs the CBI to remind us of the frailty of political positive thinking. Yet the present administration has at least made Britain’s economic sickness ...”

“... treatment meted out there to Korean immigrants. Recently, however, ‘anti-racism’ has come to be associated with a much more specialised set of activities and individual people, whom the right-wing press has lumped together as ‘the loony Left’. It has also come to be understood as part of a single package of ...”

“... Perhaps he was the typical reader we were up against.’ The New Statesman has long been haunted by typical readers like that, a remarkable proportion of whom seem to be columnists for other journals. With every fresh crisis, controversy or change of editorship over the past two decades, including its current ...”

“... fascination surged through the dissonant blare of America’s collective channel in what could be described as the Year of Bill Gates, or perhaps Year Zero of the Digital Revolution: 1995. The year was marked famously by the release of Windows 95, the largest bit of media marionetting since Apple ...”