“... you are bound to declare the same to us as soon as possible.’ As a child, hearing the banns read out in church, I used to wonder idly what kind of ‘other reason’ there might be. In fact, the canon lawyers distinguish quite a number of such reasons, including force, error, insanity, homosexuality, and also impotence, the subject of Pierre Darmon’s ...”

“... name at press conferences, and refer to articles we had written in order to show that he had read them. He seemed to have read everything. He would seldom, on those long railway journeys or over a nightcap in his hotel room, ask for our opinions, but he was eager always for the gossip which newspaper men can retail to ...”

“... at such an ‘obnoxious modernism’, they claim, as the ordinary reader is when asked to read poetic modernism. To read poetry on Graves and Riding’s terms requires serious commitment, and as cheek-turning conscientious objectors knew, guarantees social ostracism. Although the Survey is a brilliant defence of ...”

“... mumbo-jumbo’. Indeed, his real irritation was with self-styled Keynesians ‘who had usually read no more of Keynes than most Marxists had read of Marx’. Again, it is Healey as tough-minded pragmatist whom we recognise, making light of what the label on the bottle said and trusting his own palate to tell him all he ...”

“... by the art of the engineer.’ While there is art in Maillart’s bridges, they can also be read as solutions to engineering problems involving dimensions, money, time, materials, strength and stability. When architects become enamoured of the visual elegance of solutions over and above the beauty of the statics and economics, when they imitate bone ...”

“... approach ‘socialism without socialism’.The whole thrust of the new revisionist writing, as I read it, is towards the increasingly inescapable conclusion that the socialist project is now forlorn, the age of socialism over. The editors of the Socialist Register would, I think, agree with me, not that the socialist idea is obsolete, but that the logic of ...”

“... ask for news of Mr Gladstone, thinking of him as like a story that never ran out. His father would read from the paper over their tea, over the scraping of cutlery, delivering the speeches word for word in his thick, swelling accent, pausing between sentences to scoop something off his plate, breathing loudly through his nostrils as he chewed, his eyes running ...”

“... of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become. At least his models were alive. Circumstance has ...”

“... literary executors, that many of these reflections would be of interest to people who would not read Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, even though the best understanding of most of them requires the background of that work. Fifteen years ago Von Wright began selecting this material, the first result being several hundred pages of remarks. This was felt ...”

“... supposed. The ‘ancestor of the modern scholarly apparatus of footnotes’ is said to be Peter Lombard in the first half of the 12th century, though Peter was citing authorities, which makes him different from scientific modern scholars, who cite sources. Scientific history is conventionally associated with Leopold ...”

“... Had things​ been different, last year’s obituaries might have read like this. Although known for his charm, wit and talent as mimic and raconteur, Jeremy Thorpe will be chiefly remembered as the deviser of much of the programme of modern British liberalism, and the architect of one of its great periods of electoral success ...”

“... prices had gone way up. The sum bought 13 oranges, or eight ham rolls (the ham so thin we could read print through it), or several yards of liquorice ribbon, so Alex saved quite a bit of his lunch allowance. These savings played a part in his career, for a very early interest in chemistry was nourished by ‘a Home Chemistry set’ in a pink cardboard box ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”

“... Comforts of Madness is an extended imaginary exposure to what the wretches under his care feel. Peter is a long-term catatonic patient, and the novel takes the form of his interior monologue. Seemingly impervious to the outside world, Peter watches everything around him keenly. It is his choice to switch off – like ...”