“... who had worked in the First World War in Room 40at the Admiralty. They at once recruited ten more Kingsmen as well as other Cambridge dons and some German linguists. The most fertile fields they reaped were those of the Classics and Ancient History, both subjects in which evidence has to be pieced together by drawing inferences from fragmentary ...”

“... all, it was I who did that.” But those tables proclaimed the rights of a man who could no more be the man of ancient society than his national-economic and industrial relationships could be those of antiquity.’ My aim is to start out from Saint-Just’s illusion, and by asking what made it an illusion, to raise a question about the interpretation of ...”

“... old enough to have made use of public phone booths on a regular basis will know that they were more often than not damp, cold, filthy and foul-smelling, and while amply supplied with the phone numbers of prostitutes, practically impossible to make any sort of call from. So folk memory insists, at any rate. So literature insists too. Urban phone booths in ...”

“... was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish plebiscites; that everyone had stopped mocking him as a cuckold after his first wife had left him; that he was not, like so many of his fellow writers, an embusqué in some ministry or on some ...”

“... house with Paul’s latest confessions. As the investigation progressed, the Ingrams produced ever more elaborate accounts; they said there’d been buggery and gang rape. Julie Ingram said two of Paul’s colleagues had joined in when they came over to play poker. The colleagues claimed not to be able to remember anything of the kind. The accounts weren’t ...”

“... in Chinatown or talk shows’. He concludes: ‘The kid with the clicker is the Boss.’ Or, more sombrely: ‘Here consciousness emptily asserts itself.’ Both Whitman and Eliot, the polar American writers of modern life, are, perhaps, faintly present in echoes under Bellow’s powerful prose. The rhetoric of multiplicity is other than American (Robert ...”

“... quite getting the poetry. I remember being put off by all the ‘O, muse!’ stuff, which seemed more redolent of attic tallow than city neon. He was declared the first modernist, but he didn’t feel ‘modern’ in the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy ...”

“... Henry. Above all, William wanted – for himself and others – to be well enough to fulfil a more conventional plot than one of Henry’s: to marry and to work (including ‘inner work’, or self-culture).Contemplating marriage, he became exercised about ‘right breeding’ in a post-Darwinian world: should he ignore his family tendencies to infirmity ...”

“... ballet pictures from the London branch of the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture then called Figures in a French Café. Hill was striking early: the first Degas had entered a British collection only in 1872. It also made his holdings the largest in Europe at that time. In the year of its acquisition, Hill showed Figures in ...”

“... or signed a dictated peace, so all the sacrifices had been worthwhile. The end in Vietnam was more enigmatic. Either the world’s strongest military and economic power was defeated by a Third World country with less than a fifth of America’s population – a military miracle – or, even more shameful, the US ...”

“... into a few schools in Birmingham’. The so-called Trojan Horse scandal spread until it took in more than twenty schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British ...”

“... who had cut his throat, but that the fathers prevented it, he then restor’d the cords, and was more tractable ever after.’ The Voyage is not, of course, Johnson’s work, but a translation of a French translation of a 17th-century manuscript by the Portuguese Jesuit Jeronimo Lobo. But the English is Johnson’s, and it has a curtness absent from his ...”

“... job apocalypse to see that work will continue to change in the direction of machines doing more and humans doing less, and often less interesting, work. These trends overlap and compound. As Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght put it in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy,We live in a new world, remade by ...”

“... citizens. Though it sounded implausible at the time, Archer’s proposal was in line with the more baroque – perhaps pre-Cameronian – tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a ...”

“... Paul Hammond, in his introduction to the Poems, suggests that Dryden’s ‘translations are far more important, and potentially more attractive to modern readers, than the prevailing consensus would suggest’; this seems plausible, not only because of the translations’ inherent qualities but because of the resurgent ...”