“... carpenters, labourers and odd-job men. In taste and style, the garden is unashamedly aristocratic. Straight lines are to be avoided because they are ‘extremely vulgar’, and there is no room for ‘the more vulgar sort of flower’. The overall effect is to be ...”

“... disclose to the wider world and to ourselves.Mandeville was born in Rotterdam in 1670. His father, Michael, was a physician, and Bernard followed in his footsteps, studying medicine and philosophy at Leiden. His thesis in 1691 concerned the effects of digestion on mental processes. This early interest in psychology persisted, and he chose hypochondria and ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with Plomley, the actor manqué, as the straight man – a role he clearly enjoyed:Plomley (reads): ‘Vic Oliver – comedian, lightning club manipulator, violinist and comedy trick cyclist. Light work done with a horse and van.’ Is this a photograph of you?Oliver: Don’t you think it’s like ...”

“... analogies between the public and private accounts make one realise the power of each. To plunge straight into Unger’s book is like viewing a picture from too close: you need to appreciate the aesthetics of the whole before you value each part. Even his vocabulary, with its terms of art and its apparent preciosities, makes much more sense once you realise ...”

“... to the Communist Manifesto). He writes rudely about Acton’s pontificating – it leads straight to 1066 and All That – and he is not much less rude about Burckhardt. His own grasp is sometimes weaker when he has to tackle a larger theme than usual – say, ‘Fascism’. There are signs that he is occasionally uneasy about this: he can say ...”

“... her parentage at her baptism 11 years after her mother’s death, and the parish register for St Michael, Queenhithe, in the City of London, records: ‘Laura daughter of William Jerdan and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’. Asked for her father’s profession or rank, Laura appears to have been unsure what to say. The beginnings of ‘Manufacturer’ and ...”

“... memory, like a motto, or an old tune. My slightly frivolous title, ‘What Henry Knew’, takes us straight to Henry James, of course, and the (feeble) joke is meant, among other things, to indicate that I recognise how obvious a move this is, once we have started on the question of literature and knowledge. It was James who wrote so eloquently, in relation to ...”

“... book of adaptations and translations from European poetry called Imitations. In it, Lowell steps straight into the perennial themes of classical and modern poetry, desire, loss, mortality, eheu fugaces, war. He is Achilles’ blood-lust, Sappho’s pining, the tributes of Mallarmé to Gautier, and Pasternak to Akhmatova. At the same time, poetry becomes ...”

“... or elegant.‘For many gay men, fucking satisfies a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping ...”

“... it was a paper ‘written by Central European Jews for Central African blacks’ would have flown straight over my head. I didn’t know that it had championed the decolonisation of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul ...”

“... a lecturer’s spoken words (perhaps with the aid of automatic captioning) and copied large chunks straight into their essay.From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion ...”

“... he had also reverted to the middle ground of his practice, landscape painted straight from the motif. Landscape punctuated with near equivalents to figures – the sun, the stars, the trees. At its furthest reach, pervaded with them, so that the familiar biblical metaphor swished both ways and all grass was flesh. Investing vegetation ...”

“... an oik, show proper deference to seniors and get a decent tailor.This dispatch, which appears in Michael Yardley and Dennis Sewell’s 1989 book A New Model Army, sounds like a transmission from another era. But the practice of moulding the intake has continued. Patrick Hennessey, the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, served from 2004 to ...”