“... to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings off his bemused parents, put in a spot of portering at ...”

“... characters got a tick if they were on the side of liberty (Cromwell, Chatham), a cross (Charles I, James II) if they held up the march of progress. Because he went in for active royalty and made some attempt to govern on his own account rather than leaving it to the Whig aristocracy, George III had been written up as a villain and a clumsy tyrant. This view ...”

“... specialised, high-demand skills – whether tech entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, LeBron James or Jerry Seinfeld – could leverage their assets, market globally, and amass more wealth than any group in human history. But for ordinary workers, capital mobility and automation meant an ever-weakening bargaining position. Manufacturing towns lost their ...”

“... of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David ...”

“... read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we may with Harold Bloom, we can’t escape his influence. Anyway, the goal posts are contingent, and an irritable reaching after fact and reason, like Gellner’s, is doomed from the start. Thus Leo Bersani shuns ‘verification’ and finds in late Freud a discourse which ...”

“... the Tate catalogue essay which is Chapter Five here) has made a large contribution. But as Harold Rosenberg remarked tartly of Giacometti, ‘an artist who interprets his own creations rarely lacks collaborators,’ and Giacometti has had several. There is Genet’s account of the artist and his work, and of having his portrait painted. There is ...”

“... his chronic suspicion that others were plagiarising him or those around him. His loathing of Sir James Mackintosh (’the great Dung-fly’) and of William Pitt are the clearest expressions of self-contempt; his troubles with Charles Lloyd and Thomas de Quincey stem from a mutual or compound confusion of identities; and he inspired the same bitter ...”

“... books. Hence the cut-throat games of vocabulary-flashing and cultural reference pinned down by Harold Pinter and Joe Orton as Britain’s post-war national sport. Tynan, a bookish, unathletic boy, made this kind of competition his own. A compulsive player of word-games, he spattered his early writing with challenges to duels of literacy. A flip through his ...”

“... sequel’, which is not an imitation but a prolongation – like Walter Scott’s or James Fenimore Cooper’s novel cycles, or Balzac’s Human Comedy. Both types are tied to market forces. Collections like To Be Continued: An Annotated Guide to Sequels (1995) and The Whole Story: 3000 Years of Sequels and Sequences (1996) attest to the ...”

“... works’, but nobody (well, almost nobody) wants to revive the ‘copy theory of ideas’ which James and Dewey criticised. Fifty years from now, nobody will want to listen to the Voice of Being, or to deconstruct texts, but nobody will take seriously the ways of distinguishing between science, philosophy and art which Heidegger and Derrida ...”

“... of papers’ on him, of which Professor Aarsleff speaks with such evident annoyance. Professor Harold Fisch, the doyen of Vichian scholarship in English-speaking countries, whom Professor Aarsleff holds particularly responsible for inflating Vico’s transatlantic reputation, is well able to stand up for himself: but it is against myself, by my own ...”

“... It was a hymn to the glories of free trade and the spirit of Adam Smith, almost as baroque as James Thornhill’s enormous ceiling with its allegories of Time Exposing Truth and other desirable outcomes. A fine piece of Boris bravura, if you overlooked the fact that, during the heyday he was hymning, Britain, like many rapidly industrialising ...”

“... was down to his last three shillings. The turning point came one sunny morning when a man called Harold Taylor called while Coppard was up in his bedroom, ‘not entertaining a lady … but just stitching at my trousers, and they being the only pair I had not got them on’. Taylor was about to launch the Golden Cockerel Press and – when Coppard, now in ...”

“... left (communists, Trots) and the ‘legitimate’ left, which presumably refers to such groups as James Maxton’s ILP (before it gave up on the Labour Party and disaffiliated), Tony Benn and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, and Bevan and his Bevanites. This elicits the slightly alarming thought that if Bevan had ever become leader, he might have ...”

“... as she and her heroine doggedly churn through the possibilities. The writers of Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin (Ramis also directed), made it more or less the basis of their film. Bill Murray’s Phil is a sour narcissist trapped in a recurring day, able to act without restraint but knowing that he’ll wake up on the second of February again ...”