“... solved: how to keep busy, avoid trouble, stay happy and remain hopeful, while fretting away the best years of their lives waiting for the monarch to die. Thus regarded, Prince Charles’s present predicament is no exception to this general royal rule. On the contrary, it is very familiar. For all its privileges of rank and wealth, being heir to the British ...”

“... our historical understanding, and unless it can be met, the study of English iconoclasm will be at best half a success. Those who, fashionably, lament the destruction of images on artistic grounds do not know how lucky they are to look at an image and be able to see only a picture or a statue: they have no need to grapple with the power an image enjoyed in the ...”

“... his age excepting G. M. Hopkins and Hardy. Before describing how Places of the Mind retrieves his best work from the margin of literature I will suggest why The City of Dreadful Night was mislaid there. Its settled gloom is only part of the explanation. Dante’s Inferno, though gloomier than the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is more popular. Thomson’s inferno ...”

“... so martyrdom in the primitive Church was prima facie evidence of sanctity. It was also one of the best recruiting tools the new religion had, for the impressive liturgies, the great cathedrals and the dazzling intellectual achievements came later. But the authentic Acts of the Martyrs are sober documents, and do not linger over accounts of torture any more ...”

“... Sidney wanted ‘popular government’ because, as Machiavelli had argued, it was the best form of government for making war. Success abroad could be sustained only by freedom at home. Only governments in which the people participated could afford to arm them. Republics thrived when citizens ‘fought for themselves’, an experience which ...”

“... Beech and Honeydew, that she wrote so frequently about the theatre because it was what she knew best, but also because ‘it is [the actors’] business to give every reaction its due and then some. In that respect they can be said to be unusually truthful. This makes them good material for detective fiction.’ ‘Truthful’ in a rather unusual ...”

“... part of this statement than in the second. Here are 15 essays, of somewhat uneven standard, the best of which are well worth consideration by anyone interested in probing behind current political events. About half of the contributors are listed as fellows of Oxford colleges, chiefly All Souls, and their essays give the most consistent ideological tinge to ...”

“... 6, No 6), this represents a considerable feat of expansion – but no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with ...”

“... to Scripture. As was usually the case, the instigator of this accusation was a converted Jew, Nicholas Donin. The only king who answered the Pope’s call was the pious Louis IX of France, later canonised, whose views on the Jewish question were thought to be admirably forthright: the best way to carry on a disputation ...”

“... and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much to the honour of the art concerned as did Forster’s Goldsmith, nor through celebratory odes … still less through the erection of ...”

“... Mr Earnest Waller could see me now!’ To the reader it may seem that Mr Waller was doing his best but somewhere in Parr the aggrieved teenager lives on. He is so obviously not lazy or inattentive that it is surprising he still minds. His success comes from exactly the opposite qualities. Precise attention, often to the apparently unremarkable, and an ...”

“... nothing momentous need happen at all. If we simply keep doing what we are doing, then to the best of our knowledge, more and more of the planet will catch fire or be submerged under water; coastlines will wash away, glaciers collapse and rivers dry up; soils will desiccate and blow away; and millions will be on the move or dying of disease. To put it in ...”

“... When the Texan six-footer Tom Huff wished to make it big with a ‘bodice-ripper’ (currently the best-selling genre in America), he was obliged to change his name to the outrageously feminine Jennifer Wilde. Love’s Tender Fury made him/her a millionaire, but also something of a laughing-stock in the book trade. Given the present economics of fiction and ...”

“... saw themselves as part of a ‘sane and pragmatic’ political process. His attitude to truth is best described as dynamic. In the aftermath of the shooting, he recounted, his corporal of horse, Chudleigh, ‘a tough Bristolian’, had looked at him so solemnly ‘that I could not resist the temptation to say: “Kiss me, Chudleigh.”’ Having failed to ...”

“... Bagshaw, a shabby but not disagreeable literary operator, who brings out some of Powell’s best comic writing. Bagshaw has been taken as a representation of Malcolm Muggeridge, a connection which Powell, in his Journals, first denies then half accepts. Well, perhaps he just denies intending it. ‘This too never intended,’ he notes – the other ...”