“... in the summer of 1994 and at the Hayward Gallery last winter, included a small group of paintings by artists popular during the Third Reich – the type of painting which was excluded in 1985 from the Royal Academy’s survey of German art in the 20th century. The labels that accompanied these pictures at the Hayward warned that they could have no claim to ...”

“... arising from that event. The lectures have been reconstructed, from extensive notes and drafts, by the historian Dorothy Thompson, Edward’s widow, who also supplies a brief Introduction and a briefer Epilogue. All this is done with astonishing reticence. Although Dorothy Thompson shared in the determining research both in Bulgaria and in War Office ...”

“... is both lavish and comprehensive. It also insists that you come to a conclusion about him. To be offered something as complete as this and not sort out your ideas would be slovenly. Which is not to say that it’s easy. The pictures are brilliantly painted, intensely pleasurable – and oppressive. To start with ...”

“... such folk know that good has triumphed over evil and that if any problems persist, they can only be due to the legacy of apartheid. Any suggestion that the truth is actually a lot more complicated is often met with rage and moral disapproval. This Manichaean certainty reaches its zenith in the cult of Mandela. The cult has solid foundations, of ...”

“... thirty years, since Winnie Ewing’s triumph for the Scottish National Party in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, the rest of Britain has become ever more accustomed to hearing Scots drone on about their distinctive identity and needs. At last we Scots have had an opportunity to redress our grievances. On 6 May 1999 we cast our votes for the first Scottish ...”

“... Such ambitious theories, symptomatic of both Marxism and reactive anti-Marxism, have been censured by social scientists for their lack of intellectual rigour and indicted for taxonomical imprecision. What is a crisis? Who were the gentry, or the aristocracy? On the other hand, a different kind of historian wonders why we should not ...”

“... gaga. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is a mighty waste of public cash. It could scarcely be worse if the Queen had been caught running drugs on the (£35,000 per outing) Royal train or if the Duke of Edinburgh had been pleasuring corgis in Windsor Great Park. Monarchophiles had talked up the Windsors’ return to public affection after the ...”

“... doctor and the scientist – started the Aids pandemic. This is not the theory of origin favoured by most in the medical establishment: the familiar ‘cut hunter’ or natural transfer theory proposes that a single hunter or bushmeat seller became infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) while skinning or butchering a chimp, and that the pandemic ...”

“... take personal charge of the management of the crisis. But when the Lincolnshire problem proved to be shortlived, he unwisely wound the preventative operation down, persuading himself that the crisis was under control, even over. But at that very moment it spread to Yorkshire, into the pastoral uplands of Richmondshire, on towards Skipton and the Lake ...”

“... that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside observers. For an edition in 1960 called ‘Panorama Goes to a Convention’, Ludovic Kennedy attended a press conference at the ...”

“... If innocence were a family business, a terraced saga like Buddenbrooks, our age would be the sickly generation that abandons the firm and takes up the piano. We would seem to have nothing left in the innocence bank; we are rich on suspicion. In literature, contemporary examples abound. Martin Amis, for instance, offers his own brief allegory of the writer’s modern suspicion in The Information ...”

“... at the hands of desperate architectural ideologues, but from run-of-the-mill vandals, attracted by its sheer oddity. When I visited it in January, it was overrun by brambles; much of its balustrading had been kicked away; its four white marble columns had long since been heaved off (the nearby railway line their likely ...”

“... the anonymously ugly spaces that are not on the official register of what any place is supposed to be. Every city has them. Thinking about Paris is more likely to bring to mind the Eiffel Tower, or graceful rows of mansard-roofed buildings on chestnut-lined boulevards, than the long cement passages of the Métro lit by bad ...”

“... is history also what people are afraid of, even on Summit Avenue? In a material sense it can’t be, since we fear, by definition, what hasn’t happened yet. If it had happened, to adapt a line of Kafka’s about belief in progress, it wouldn’t be an object of fear, it would ...”

“... in Enduring Love (1997): in most of his books there’s at least one character who’s mesmerised by powerful fantasies, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. And since ‘stories demand simple and incisive sets of oppositions,’ as McEwan told an interviewer in 1985, we also meet people who are very impatient with fantasy. Joe, the ...”