“... published not long ago, and is lucky enough to find it still wearing its jacket, one may learn a little more about the book’s purpose. The jacket bears the bold subtitle ‘The best witty, pithy statements from all time pertinent to people and life today’, a flourish which may have been dropped for reasons of modesty, or truthfulness, or both. From the ...”

“... praise lavished on Debussy’s delicate textures and timbres: ‘Why won’t he allow me just a little corner of his shade? … I don’t want to take any of his sun’). The second was Maurice Ravel, a stalwart champion of Satie, who in 1910 founded the Société musicale indépendante (SMI) in Paris as a counterblast to the stuffy conservatism of the ...”

“... Why do some people need it so much, a fix that becomes hard to do without? ‘What a vile little diary,’ wrote Katherine Mansfield on January 1915, ‘but I am determined to keep it this year.’ Bereavements and troubles made the ‘other’ in it infinitely precious, a release from the daily grind of consciousness, in which most people without the ...”

“... earlier spell as a Cabinet Minister, and it is a relief to find that the younger Mrs Castle is a little less prolix: the five and a half years from October 1964 to May 1970 rate only about half a million words – an average daily stint of about two hundred and fifty words, though again there are days which take five or six times more than this to deal ...”

“... seems to come across as the gleeful, clever-clever college kid, mugging up on the life of the little people for his intended magnum opus: he works for an educational publishing company (and is sacked for pedantry); in a hotel in the Catskills (‘those little excursions into the backwaters and shit holes of the world ...”

“... the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre. His poetry had come to be little regarded within fifty years of his death, and his primary reputation by the end of the 16th century was for buffoonery: he was turned into a jest-book figure, and in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood play within a play, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of ...”

“... and mischievous proprietor than Lord Beaverbrook, no more technically gifted editor than Arthur Christiansen, and few more celebrated reporters than the paper’s defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow came a torrent of newsprint that set the ...”

“... how amply each can enrich the other. Take, for instance, his excellent chapter on ‘Joe Gormley, Arthur Scargill and the Miners’. If all historians during the miners’ strike of 1984-5 had shown such balance, knowledge of context and willingness to face unpalatable truths, their profession might have done more to reduce the dreadful suffering that ...”

“... Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little room in South London in the late 1950s,’ he wrote in the introduction to Tales from the Texas Woods, ‘I earned a wonderful living writing about an Arizona I’d never visited, about the Apache and the Comanche, about the torments of the Texas ...”

“... to fail to acquire French a great disappointment. His friendships with such as Lady Gregory and Arthur Symons offered him only limited access to either language. Despite his wretched start and these persistent incapacities, he became a remarkably well-read intellectual, with a passion for Nietzsche, for Plato and Neoplatonism, for learned Italian ...”

“... British Government chose to disregard in 1917. Some thirty years afterwards the English Zionist Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as ‘one of the most improbable documents of all times’, since in it ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. ‘Iimprobable’ the Balfour Declaration undoubtedly was, yet ...”

“... piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton ...”

“... found that absence of panic unnerving. In other words, the present flare of Scotophobia began as little more than a media ramp, fuelled by and to some extent co-ordinated with the Conservative Party. Its motives are transparent. When the bombardment opened last summer, it was obviously targeted to damage and disable Gordon Brown, the Conservatives’ future ...”

“... and made transportation the greatest bottleneck in our war economy’. To Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Zuckerman and the Germans, it seemed as if the campaign gave the Allies the space they needed to establish a beachhead in Normandy and then push for Paris. There is of course no way of knowing what would have happened had Zuckerman’s advice been ...”