“... at the beginning that Wilder has ‘the gift of knowing what the truth looks like’, and that he may have this from being a journalist, you know that nothing too demanding is going to happen. This is the territory of received ideas backed up by false premises. But then there are real benefits to this approach. The slacker the question, the better Wilder’s ...”

“... as-told-to by a certain ‘Pauline’, written up in the third person by ‘Alice Michel’, who may have been the novelist ‘Rachilde’ (co-editor and co-founder of Le Mercure), it is not so much kiss-and-tell as pose-and-tell. And it is a curious text to evaluate, the more so when rendered into American English, with Degas as a ‘cranky and demanding ...”

“... he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled ... so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this volume have been willing to follow. And though this is compensated for by the distinction of many of the papers it is unfortunately true of ...”

“... own living; nor could they divorce their husband or limit the number of children they had. Theirs may have been a gilded cage, but they were nevertheless imprisoned and silenced by fear – ‘the fear that forbids freedom in the private house’. They were afraid of the male aggression that surfaced in the angry opposition with which the majority of men met ...”

“... will, summed up by the authors as ‘democracy’. Readers are warned that the book’s argument may not be ‘immediately clear’ and are exhorted to be patient, for Multitude is ‘a mosaic from which the general design gradually emerges’. Before turning to that design, it’s important to stress how welcome this expansiveness is. In a venture like ...”

“... cassettes in his cab and plasters the interior with coloured stickers containing the name of God may be pious – but not strenuously so. Islam is part of his lifestyle, but not the key to his identity. Islam and Arabism merge imperceptibly into one another. Although the two may conflict at the intellectual and political ...”

“... a generation, as Fitzgerald had done, or seek to scrub the world new with carbolic silences, like Ernest Hemingway, or to turn things upside down, like James Baldwin. His political triumphs would be in the manner of his small personal displays – seasonal disturbances on the ground where fashion and writing and crime and movies met and clashed by night. And ...”

“... side of political life, as well as about the many ways in which individual rationality may be collectively self-defeating. But there is more to politics than individuals acting out of calculated self-interest: both calculation and self-interest may be conspicuously lacking. Consider, for a start, an alternative ...”

“... his last thirty years in Los Angeles writing screenplays, among them In Love and War (1996), about Ernest Hemingway’s First World War experiences, and Frida (2002), a biopic about Frida Kahlo, had been a ‘movie balcony bug’ from the age of five. ‘The heart,’ he wrote, ‘never has to be lonely in a dark movie house.’ Among the many things he ...”

“... found it oppressive; but the majority lived in cheerful disobedience.’ Well, that is what it may have looked like from the perspective of Combe Florey House and Downside, but not, I can assure Mr Waugh, from the point of view of the Catholic ‘majority’ in ordinary parishes up and down this country. When my wife and I married in 1959, the Catholic ...”

“... all ideologies, including fogeyism, must initially be synthesised by the educated, a process which may then be misrepresented as wilful ‘forging’, ‘dreaming up’ etc. However, an ideology which has convulsed the world must be more than wilful. At this deeper level it is nationalism which has invented modern intellectuals. Their prehistory lay in the ...”

“... of social benefit with the minimum of economic disturbance.’ The carefully balanced antitheses may come over a little too rhetorically now, but they encapsulate exactly what many in the Labour Party would have agreed that they had in mind. The third principle was the protection of the legitimate interests of organised labour in the face of the traditional ...”

“... Rotsoge, Madame Salmajour, Monsieur Panado, Herr Traum, Frau Sorge, Lul de Faltenin, L’Hermès Ernest, Noubosse. The exuberance of Apollinaire’s life and writings (perhaps best summed up by the title of his pornographic novel, Les Onze Mille Verges, ‘The 11,000 Penises’), his compulsion to overflow boundaries and genres, to ...”

“... Australia (1930) for a London publisher during a brief inter-war return to his homeland; Sir Ernest Scott edited a more substantial conspectus as a volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1933). It was only with the expansion of the university system after the Second World War that Australian history began to be studied and taught in any ...”

“... comfortably than when forced to ride bicycles or stand on their heads. More ambitious maîtres may decide that Il Barbiere di Siviglia would suddenly become relevant to alienated modern youth if the setting was transposed to a Chinese restaurant in Orpington, but their intentions will be thwarted by the masonic gesticulations of a cast quite unable to ...”