“... Michael Walzer is one of America’s leading social critics, an editor of the magazine Dissent and the author of such books of political philosophy as Spheres of Justice, a systematic discussion of the nature of justice in society. In The Company of Critics he steps back from the activity of social criticism to reflect on the work of a number of other 20th-century social critics ...”

“... were watching a bland television soap opera called The Sullivans when her father, the Reverend Michael Saward, Vicar of St Mary’s, Ealing, opened the door to three men wearing balaclavas and brandishing knives. After they had ransacked the house, two of the men raped Jill. Her father and boyfriend were tied up and beaten unconscious. For all the ...”

“... and nobs that he owned newspapers to make political propaganda. The life which Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie have written begins with a piece of elegant writing, like a dream sequence. It is an unpublished piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot and ...”

“... since Labour began electing ‘leaders’) never to have held a ministerial post – being PPS to Michael Foot for a year does not count. He is the only British party leader to have been an EU Commissioner – and is likely to remain so. As a result his record in ‘government’ is hard to judge, since what the Commissioners do (unless it is thought to be ...”

“... film to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details’. ‘To watch Murch at work,’ Michael Ondaatje writes in The Conversations (2002), ‘is to see him delve into almost invisible specifics, where he harnesses and moves the bones or arteries of a scene, relocating them so they will alter the look of the features above the skin.’ The ...”

“... consulted in 1597 (when she thought herself pregnant by a neighbouring mercer, Henry Wood), and of George Wilkins, the violent brothel-keeper-turned-author with whom Shakespeare cowrote his most innocent play, Pericles, and with whom the hapless Mary Belott née Mountjoy lodged for a while after her marriage. A.L. Rowse wrote about Forman in the 1970s (though ...”

“... of the worst. He dislikes scarcely any of his characters, and a comparison with Jane Austen and George Eliot, from whom he learned so much, is instructive. They are both quite withering about figures they disapprove of. James has a few such figures – in The Ivory Tower, the socialite Gussie Bradham is one. But generally, and especially in his late ...”

“... as the ‘convincing and accessible near-novels by biographers like André Maurois and George Painter’ suggest, and it reaches out to a universe far more varied than ‘the thin thread of Proust’s biography’. These are fighting words in our biographical days, but the reminder is more than timely. What we miss if we collapse Balbec into ...”

“... and always attentive to the chance that superstition might contain its portion of truth. George Santayana, James’s student and colleague, said ‘he gave a sincerely respectful hearing to sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and imposters . . . Thus William James became the friend and helper of those ...”

“... We’ve​ got form, Michael Gove and I. ‘Richard Evans may hold a professorship,’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, after I had attacked him for claiming that Britain had fought the First World War for democracy, ‘but these arguments, like the interpretations of Oh! What a Lovely War! and Blackadder, are more reflective of the attitude of an undergraduate cynic playing to the gallery in a Cambridge Footlights revue rather than a sober academic contributing to a proper historical debate ...”

“... fads and the highbrows who prattled on about them. At a meeting of Edwardian Fabians attended by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb, Attlee whispered to his brother: ‘Do we have to grow a beard to join this show?’ The confident pre-1914 left, he later reflected, had been too rigid in its scientific approach to social problems and altogether ‘too ...”

“... bowdlerised by record company executives to ‘NWA’. A few minutes later, I am a witness as George Hamilton, the actor and walker, or beard, to Hollywood matrons of a certain age, takes the air outside Paddington’s, an ersatz tea shoppe on fashionable Melrose Avenue. A blonde whom the checkout tabloids would probably call ...”

“... Hailsham considered Conservatism to be ‘not so much a philosophy as an attitude’. Finally, Michael Oakeshott, the leading Conservative philosopher of the 20th century, wrote of ‘the distorting mirror of an ideology’ and identified the main enemy of limited government as ideological politics and state planning. Above all, Oakeshott laid down in his ...”

“... nor was he tempted four years later, when he had a clear lead over his anti-war challenger George McGovern. Only in 1976 – when Nixon’s post-resignation successor Gerald Ford found himself languishing 33 points behind the challenger, Jimmy Carter – did an incumbent president have sufficient incentive to address the limitations of the 1934 ...”

“... been related in some degree to almost everyone else who was anyone. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell complained that in certain parts of southern England in the 1930s you couldn’t throw a brick without hitting the niece of a bishop. He might have added that a bishop’s niece couldn’t throw a brick without hitting a great-aunt who was a big ...”