“... to be himself throughout is the one person whom Woodward acknowledges at the outset did not grant an interview for the book: Trump. The president emerges as a bizarre and brutish character, but his behaviour has a strong streak of consistency. He cannot bear to be wrong and he will never admit defeat. He changes his mind but only because he forgets what ...”

“... funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of ...”

“... United States’, who cultivated indifference to foreign conflicts, and who perversely refused to grant the president the autonomy he needed to conduct an effective foreign policy. Dallek doesn’t seem to realise that, after the failure of Wilson’s attempt to justify their personal sacrifice in taking part in the First World War, Americans might have ...”

“... Freud gave equal respect to the appeals of moralism and romanticism, but refused either to grant one of these priority over the other or to attempt a synthesis of them. He distinguished sharply between a private ethic of self-creation and a public ethic of mutual accommodation, and persuades us that there is no bridge between them provided by ...”

“... aid) slashed. Between 2010/11 and 2015/16, more than 50 per cent was cut from the central grant to local government; close to or more than 30 per cent from the budgets of the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Justice and the ...”

“... literature’ and to modernism in particular presents problems. It is as easy to feel that James and Wells are incompatible as it is to reject the notion that Dostoevsky (let alone Oedipus Rex) has any family relationship with the detective story. When we come to Orlando or Pynchon, the conviction of incompatibility remains firm, but the arguments ...”

“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... think, too much ... I am too civilised’ is inconsistent with this other frame of mind. Please grant me the right to inconsistency: in the camp our state of mind was unstable, it oscillated from hour to hour between hope and despair. The coherence I think one notes in my books is an artifact, a rationalisation a posteriori. PR: Survival in Auschwitz was ...”

“... have many distinguished old boys though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss. 13 June. Three police acquitted in the case of Joy Gardner who died after being gagged with 13 inches of tape, a restraining belt and leg irons. It’s not ...”

“... Enron sought, even if funding had not flowed in their direction from the corporation. Bush did not grant Enron the single decision it perhaps most desired: for the US Administration to withdraw its objections to the Kyoto Protocol limiting greenhouse gas emissions. If it seems odd that the corporation was in favour of Kyoto, remember Enron’s commitment to ...”

“... then called, also entitled me to three years of Scottish Education Department postgraduate student grant. Sussex, I read, offered a one-year taught MA in philosophy, which included Marx and Hegel: the ideal conversion course. I applied, I was accepted, I had funding, off I went.The University of Sussex, established in 1961, was the first of Britain’s ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”

“... advise as well as lament the members of their families: Meg Mullach, a spirit attached to the Grant clan, would stand next to the laird during chess games and show him the winning moves.) There are different kinds of ‘nature spirit’: tree spirits like ‘the One with the White Hand’, a Somerset moorland spirit who emanates from a birch ...”

“... He didn’t do this by writing a ‘gay novel’ like Maurice, or like those that Gore Vidal and James Baldwin would later write in The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room – novels in which the homosexual condition is itself the subject, with an unusual dominance of maleness. For Forster a forthright novel on homosexual themes was a legal ...”

“... readers would do well to consider the absolute state of 1970s popular entertainment – James Bond, Benny Hill, Jimmy Savile – and what that might indicate about everyday life at the time for teenage girls: the very walls had eyes in them that followed you everywhere, making you feel, as Chris’s father made her feel, ‘sickened and queer’. In ...”