“... portrait of Achille-Cléophas; while the pinched virtue of his grandmother, who ‘thought straight and thought wrongly’ reminds us inevitably of Mme Flaubert. Sartre liked to argue that there was one great and significant difference between himself and Flaubert: he was loved and pampered as a child, whereas Flaubert was mal aimé. Even if we accept ...”

“... the biographer looking over her shoulder. Almost as often, one finds oneself reading passages of straight reporting as if they were playing the tricks of a novel, using flatness to imply feeling, disguising as unruffled objectivity the chilled revulsion of a wife. For this is not, it must have leaked out by now, the traditional saint’s life expected of ...”

“... poor old Land League were presented as non-constitutional headaches for O’Connell and Parnell. Michael Collins was a Treaty negotiator rather than a warlord. Outside in the world there were car bombs and hunger strikes, done in the name of our nation, in the name of history. Inside we were cleansing history, concentrating on those aspects of our past which ...”

“... same side as their leader. Rather than acting as a vehicle for Bevan’s views, Tribune, edited by Michael Foot, described itself as leading the campaign against the H-bomb. Lee believed that the Bevanites’ desertion was responsible for the cancer that killed Bevan in 1960: ‘until their attacks began, he never had so much as a stomach ache,’ she wrote ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”

“... the eyes are abominable, and about the mouth. Eyebrows making one circle, if meeting, or close and straight, are equally bad . . . Eyes long, and wide between the eyebrows; and no wrinkles in the forehead when they laugh, or about the mouth, are signs of bad luck and duplicity. Eyes all zigzag are full of lies. A low, flat forehead is bad; so are uneven ...”

“... Last month​ , Michael Gove dispatched Ian Paisley Junior, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim, with brutal indifference. Brexit was done, the DUP had been done over, and everyone could see that it was entirely the party’s own fault. On 11 February, Gove spoke from the House of Commons while Paisley Junior sat at his computer in Ballymena ...”

“... ground; ancient architects induced a subtle curvature into a line of columns so that it would look straight. Kant’s philosophy of perception would not require symbolic emendation were we to live under the starry heavens without language or culture, matters to which he paid no great heed. What Panofsky supposed is that people under different symbolic systems ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, was being taken over by competitive repudiations of Michael O’Halloran, the much put-down Member for North Islington who had come over to the Social Democrats in the company of a considerable contingent of councillors. The timing of the Islington cross-over enabled Liberal speakers to put a name to what gave ...”

“... impulses? Or does Kant have some sturdy intuitions on his side too? If semantics really is (as Michael Dummett has claimed) ‘first philosophy’, should we try desperately to make the right decision between Russell and Kripke, so as to know whether it will be necessary to reconstruct the rest of philosophy and culture? Modern thought on everything from ...”

“... abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic Pompeii. Zoom in further and you can see structures straight out of a biology textbook: mitochondria, bubble-shaped fat reservoirs, even cellular nuclei. Poinar and Hess later speculated that if a mosquito were preserved in amber just after it had sucked blood from a dinosaur, it might be possible to recover the ...”

“... of investigation, so I bypassed the merchandise counter with its ectoplasmic T-shirts and made straight for the auditorium – or was it Valhalla, the hall of the slain?The auditorium had an emptiness that could speak to us all. One shouldn’t really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from ...”

“... Englander’ in Taylor coming out, a superannuated cast of mind he shares with his close friend Michael Foot. It is English history that one writes, the Scots, Irish and Welsh constituting ‘the lesser breeds [who] were allowed in when they made a difference in English affairs, as they often did.’ It is also a lingering sense that Britain is still a ...”

“... of the most-famous-butterfly-hunter-in-the-world ready to swipe, the gaze for once directed straight at us, the chubby knees beaming ingenuously; and we know the quarry is no palpitating ‘lep’, as he called them, but palpitating us. This bit of calculated charm appears in most books about Nabokov, but decently tucked away. Here it provides the ...”