“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... legitimate and illegitimate, whose opportunities and expectations they were attempting to manage. John Tailyour, another Scot, moved to Jamaica in 1783, having been encouraged to consider the opportunities there by his extremely wealthy and successful cousin Simon Taylor. Taylor, according to Lady Nugent, the governor’s ...”

“... the ‘fair oak’ situated at the back of the playing space – while the magician-astrologer Simon Forman claimed to have seen Macbeth and Banquo ‘riding through a wood’, rather than a ‘blasted heath’, before meeting ‘three women fairies’ at the beginning of Macbeth. There is nothing in Shakespeare’s text to indicate any such spectacle; and ...”

“... The house is wrecked and the whole family is in Pristina. I spent Sunday playing football with Simon and his sister. Their uncle is already rebuilding their house for the second time. He left a note for the Serbs saying: ‘Burn this down 100 times, I will rebuild it.’ They left one for him saying: ‘Put a stick up your arse.’ Today I found Faton and ...”

“... by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the ...”

“... detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy is indulgent, but Hendy’s volume is more fun, while Potter’s occasionally dips into right-minded solemnity. They both more than earn their place on the ever lengthening ...”

“... which, though emotionally logical, I doubt you would guess (and which I shan’t give away). Simon Leys, that wise Belgian Sinologist, critic and novelist, rightly notes, in The Hall of Uselessness, Simenon’s ability to achieve ‘unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious) … It would ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... order’ – illegal enemy combatants – said by the former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo (the author of two of the infamous legal memoranda on the legitimacy of torture) to be, yes, equivalent to pirates. We are back at the door wherein we came. It might be thought remarkable that a scholarly book, published as the US administration, in the ...”

“... who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to ...”

“... When Allen Tate died in 1979, Simon and Schuster speedily commissioned a biography, to be written, they announced, by Ned O’Gorman, a poet of some reputation and a friend of two of Tate’s three wives. O’Gorman, it would seem, got going in the usual way, writing to all the obvious Tate contacts and attempting to interview key intimates ...”

“... Quetelet persuaded the Belgian Government to send him to Paris to study astronomy with Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the acknowledged doyen of the discipline. There he imbibed not only Laplace’s celestial mechanics but also his treatises on probability theory and his enthusiasm for criminal statistics – which the French Government had begun to collect ...”

“... make a comprehensive move towards more open government in the manner discussed by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee in Freedom of Information … Freedom of the Invididual?, a new collection of essays edited by Julia Neuberger. Three newspapers are currently being sued and two others prohibited ...”

“... in by Carl André, while Samuel Beckett endlessly redistributes 16 stones among four pockets, and John Cage copies a star-atlas onto music paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That ...”

“... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...”