“... its mass media, sometimes at the expense of its idea of nationality. On the eve of World War Two, John Reith believed passionately in radio broadcasting as an extension of national culture, but was outmanoeuvred by the audience’s delight in ‘knob-twiddling’. By 1935, there were 7.4 million radio licences in the United Kingdom, but not all radios were ...”

“... our present Radio 3 ... fears every listener that isn’t listening.’ McIntyre’s successor, John Drummond, a more robust sort of Reithian, resisted populist pressures as much as anything by sheer force of personality, but a real cultural turning-point had by now (1985) been reached. In the prevailing Thatcherite contempt for élites the postwar ...”

“... is employed as an adviser to ABB, which was in the dire condition of the dinosaur when von Koerber took over. Drastic, innovative action had to be taken, first by sacking 10 per cent of the workforce (downsizing, restructuring, rationalising) who, not realising the creativity of the act, were unconvinced of the long-term benefits (for the company) and chorused ...”

“... lives. She speaks of the London press as ‘evil and morally corrupt’. From Whitbread winner to John Knox in four easy weeks. Even the friendlier Scottish papers were apt to harp on rags-to-riches, overnight success. Commentators should take this truth to heart: no novelist ever has an overnight success. Atkinson has been writing for fifteen years, and it ...”

“... disappointingly, to be just a desire to have even more money. Buchan offers a fascinated sketch of John Law, who for five hundred days or so ‘ruled France more completely than its absolute monarchs’. During this period, in the early 18th century, he controlled the country’s foreign trade and its national debt, as well as about half of what is now the ...”

“... trouble in drumming up a fan club. Satanism is in this sense just the flipside of suburbia. As John Carey has observed, the grotesque freaks who populate the fringes of a Dickens novel represent the sadistic vengeance which the text wreaks on its own decorous middle-class story-line. Nobody would ask Oliver Twist to dinner if they could hook Fagin ...”

“... dose of metaphysics temporarily moved Byron to the heady stuff of Childe Harold III, and Shelley took the hint of Byron’s Horatian manner to write the urbane Julian and Maddalo. But, much more important, each brought to fruition in the other a pre-existing style of genius quite opposite to his own. It was Byron’s company, of all things, that seems to ...”

“... of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It took 12 years for the advice given by the Foreign Office’s legal adviser Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax on the day of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to surface:The Secretary of State’s enquiry about how ...”

“... physically identical but morally distinct men swap lives. Not only does the unattached but lonely John find himself forced into the complex identity of his alter ego, Count Jean de Gué, but his physical resemblance to de Gué’s mother and daughter bestows a past and a future on him, drawing him into the human chain. Taken to extremes, such permeability ...”

“... 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 ‘...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their clothes are more interesting. It ...”

“... insulate the reader from everyday life just as surely as writing them had done for him. So writing took up most of his time. The only problem was that he also had a wife and two children, one of whom, Lucia, he seemed more intent on gathering into his art than recognising as a person in her own right. Or rather, if Carol Loeb Shloss’s account is to be ...”

“... itself. The infamous ‘war guilt’ clause was right: Germany together with Austria-Hungary took the decision to start a war in the Balkans and to accept the risk that war in the Balkans would set off a wider European one. At the time, and in retrospect, it was folly. Russia had made it clear that, having backed off on earlier occasions, it would ...”