“... itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great artists who supported, opposed or somehow survived in Nazi Bayreuth. She details Busch’s disgust, Toscanini’s theatrical outrage, Furtwängler’s meekness and Tietjen’s compromises, but ignores the ...”

“... douched, frozen, pilled, potioned, lotioned, salivated … by Act of Parliament?’ blustered John Gibbs, hydropath and teetotaller, in a pamphlet denouncing the act. The anti-vaccination movement was born. It was, initially, little more than a collection of outraged scribblers: the 1853 Act was easily evaded and Poor Law Unions, which had quite enough to ...”

“... Prime Minister has done precisely this in defending increases in petrol tax, but it is a pity it took an anti-petrol tax campaign by the tabloids to force him to do so. The petrol tax is, of course, largely, though not quite, regressive: it is an ideal instrument for governments which do not care much about income distribution. And Britain has now one of the ...”

“... by a story that we know either to be true (analytic literature) or to be made up (fiction). As John Bayley once remarked, writing about Iris Murdoch, it is bound to be a tautology to talk about ‘freedom’ in a novel, in which only the author is free to do as he likes. Pushkin, and Tolstoy following him, liked to emphasise that their characters ‘...”

“... this point, rather than during his wartime residence in Moscow, that the significant reorientation took place in Cripps’s political outlook. His Marxist terminology gradually faded away as the centrality of the class war was replaced by the invocation of the national interest and appeals to common humanity, increasingly framed in a language of duty and ...”

“... will themselves have become as extinct as the ones that science fiction once expressed. (John Clute, quoted here, considered the entire genre a ‘set of fairytales about the afterlife’.) To read this book is to become infected with a fascination I hadn’t realised Mars held. By the end I was left feeling a strange, even European twinge of envy. I ...”

“... much sought after today (a print of his poster poem Le circus!! will set you back £4000), but it took the publication of Alec Finlay’s Selections from his father’s work (2012) to bring his activities as a writer and artist into proper perspective. Selections begins with Finlay’s not exactly forthcoming ‘autobiographical sketch’, written in 1966. He ...”

“... the dog, and an empty spud bag to take up the shite’ remind us that we are not in the world of John Banville. The odd reference to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the fact that there are immigrants around and a young woman, saying, ‘I was just like Oh my God,’ alert the reader with a mild shock that the novel is set in 2006, not 1906. As frequently in ...”

“... with, democracies are perfectly capable of replacing bad leaders with even worse ones. If you took a visitor from another planet to the United States and explained that regular elections are what gives the American system its edge over, say, the Chinese system, you might get a puzzled response. So if people have had enough of Obama then all they have to ...”

“... nation; a few years ago this provoked the almost comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... starting out, his good cheer was a clue that he wasn’t a programmatic avant-gardist, though it took a while for everyone to notice. In U&I (1991), his witty exploration of his feelings towards John Updike (‘this imaginary friend I have constructed out of sodden crisscrossing strips of rivalry and gratefulness over an ...”

“... about the way the industry sees the world. Bergin’s account starts in the 1980s with the rise of John Browne, the cosmopolitan striver-turned-mogul who was BP’s chief executive from 1995 until 2007, when a young ex-boyfriend sold the story of their relationship to the Mail on Sunday and Browne resigned. (He has since headed the Browne Review of higher ...”

“... seemed mostly untouched by genealogical anxiety. In the early 20th century, logical positivists took pains to point out that such thinking was undermined by the ‘genetic fallacy’: the mistaken assumption that ‘bad’ origins necessarily make for false beliefs or illegitimate practices. Obviously, a bad origin can result in a true belief. I might ...”

“... to ‘fuck my mouth.’ ‘The pornographic words excited him. “Fuck my mouth,” she urged and took his cock once more inside her. He … got onto his knees. He continued fucking his wife in the mouth.’ Connie tells Richie that Hector raped her, which isn’t true (the affair was unconsummated); her description of what didn’t happen is also ...”