“... novel had been wholly dire in their presentation of warfare since the Napoleonic Wars. Linklater took a middling position. In one of his autobiographies, Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970), he wrote regarding his own Private Angelo: ‘War, in Italy, was a drunken, destructive and impertinent clown; to deal justly and truthfully with it, one had to keep one’s ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... discovered that Republican and Democratic acceptance speeches of the Sixties and Seventies took different approaches to ‘sovereignty’. Republicans stressed the ultimate authority of God, which they implicitly separated from the authority of the people. The Democrats were more likely to bring the two together, stressing the sovereignty of the people ...”

“... Priapeville, Bordelopolis, Voluptopolis. There is possibly a touch more wit in the wry name that John Camden Hotten, who laboured in the dubious sector of the London book trade, gave to a series of reprints he published in the 1870s: the ‘Library Illustrative of Social Progress’. Another example of Victorian erotica, The Pearl, A Journal of Facetiae ...”

“... run out and that’s that. Yes, that was Boycott’s finest innings yet: Those fifteen runs that took three days to get. Boycott was born to give the Wisden bores The perfect subject for their lucubrations. He is the average oaf whose average scores Are averaged out in their long computations, Reducing you to helpless yawns and snores. Like small boys ...”

“... as ‘the representative of the goddess of health in the more or less indecent exhibition of John Graham ... a quack-doctor’, but Ms Fraser dismisses this association with a Georgian peep-show on chronological grounds, and plausibly suggests that the legend was derived retrospectively from a Rowlandson cartoon that belongs to the years of her ...”

“... as far as possible, he appreciated the work of the other two. Alexander’s concern with Rome took some extremely practical forms. He wanted to straighten the main streets and clear the clutter of stalls away into ‘shopping centres’, as Krautheimer calls them. ‘Three times I’ve ordered that florist away from the porch of the Pantheon’ runs one ...”

“... of writing that the pterodactyl-like lady, twice widowed, and a psychoanalyst by profession, took over. Mrs Bradley – who is apt to provoke a suspect by giving him a good poke in the ribs – is nothing if not unorthodox in her investigative procedures. The early Mitchell novels (some of which have been reappearing recently) are generally very ...”

“... told they had ‘set all the town together by the ears, which is the true office of a Puritan’. John White, the patriarch of Dorchester, and his allies, got a touring company of players banned, only to be attacked as a ‘counterfeit company and pack of Puritans’. It is one of the skills of this book that it encourages sympathy with both sides in the ...”

“... these strange games was a major pastime in LA. Aguy in the Westwood arcade once said to me, as he took the controls: ‘Now let’s get down to some serious Pacman here.’ Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is more of a minority interest out there on the West Coast. Doing both seemed a good way to get a sense of what it would be like to be a philosopher in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”