“... they are: Mr Wise is a dunce, Mr King is a Whig, Mr Coffin’s uncommonly sprightly, And huge Mr Little broke down in a gig While driving fat Mrs Golightly.The lines come to life when they begin to see names less as clues to the characters of their owners – whether faithfully reflected, or just as reliably not – than as temporary restrictions or skins to ...”

“... might mean, and what their advantages might be, these snippets of information can be of little use to the candidate. And nowhere is there the vaguest hint that some boards also allow the study of texts outside the canon which is outlined in the remainder of the book. It is quite possible that the author does not consider these choices to be ...”

“... it stemming from Immanuel Kant – a man who spent his life in a backwater of East Prussia, cared little for the arts, and knew very little about them. His Critique of Judgment says what is, in Carey’s words, ‘patently untrue’, namely that the beautiful may be so called only if the speaker believes that everybody else ...”

“... Aristotle’s conception of poetic truth was one in which correspondence with reality played little part, and his biology gave an account of what he thought ought to be true in the light of his deep conception of the true purposes of nature. Thus it ought to be true according to the hebdomadal rule that male semen is infertile between the ages of seven ...”

“... like that of his creations, is of a gaseous nature. Max Beerbohm once wrote a memorable little sketch of a visit to the Sage of Box Hill, and of hearing Meredith’s voice addressing the air as he approached, and recommencing the conversation as he walked away. In mid-century Meredith dazzled his friends and public, but the bubble eventually ...”

“... stood from the green jungle carpet, browning at the top like cauliflowers. Their trunks curve a little this way and that, giving the appearance of reptilian life.’ So Greene describes it in Congo Journal. It might well have been while running away from these afternoon bores that he imagined the flight of Deo Gratias, Querry’s boy, into the forest at ...”

“... their fathers, must become themselves, for how else will they acquire the authority to teach the little replicas to come? When this part of the message is being advertised, the tone of the novel becomes tediously wise: ‘Everything has to come to an end, Timothy,’ says Clement. ‘But that’s only because other things have to begin. You walk from one ...”

“... Dorset peasantry were ‘exceedingly just and clear-sighted’. In the Twenties Powys was still little known, though that was to change when Mr Weston’s Good Wine won enough esteem to become one of the first sixpenny Penguins. (It even got a perceptible nod of approval from Downing College.) Warner had a hand in Powys’s rise to fame, having recommended ...”

“... and joyous hystorye’, and its presumptive author, in C.S. Lewis’s phrase, ‘little better than a criminal’. Actually, Lewis much understated the case. If one goes by the records, slowly unearthed in the Twenties and Thirties by Edward Cobb, Edward Hicks and A.C. Baugh, the Malory of Newbold Revel was not ‘...”

“... be attributed to systems of stimulus and response (ring bell, dog salivates), behaviourists had little need for germ plasm, cheerfulness factors or heritability. Perhaps more significant, studies of the biological bases of psychological traits came into stark disrepute in the 1930s and 1940s owing to their prominent place in Nazi eugenics ...”

“... California. It elicited a groan.Harrison was my mentor, or, as he preferred it, I was his ‘little brother’. A gap of 58 years separated our fraternal union. When I was six, he yelled at me for eating my waffle ‘like a barbarian’. When I was eight, he explained to me the concept of nuclear war. When I was fourteen, he got me drunk for the first ...”

“... also fingering Richard Crossman, Anthony Howard and all the other post-Sixties editors. There is little disagreement, however, about when the glory days began. The New Statesman whose past is so ubiquitously pressed into service for rival versions of its future is the magazine whose identity was moulded during the Thirties, under the editorship of Kingsley ...”

“... times, and it has now been on the international diplomatic agenda for a century and a half. When Arthur Koestler visited it during the 1948 war, he was filled with gloom at the ‘international quarrelling, haggling and mediation’ that he could see looming. ‘No other town,’ he wrote, ‘has caused such continuous waves of killing, rape and unholy ...”

“... namely, that he did indeed think he could become Leader of the Labour Party. He had been in very little doubt about that matter from the moment he became the youngest-ever President of the Board of Trade in the post-war Attlee Government. But it took him 18 years of slithering up and down Disraeli’s greasy pole from the moment of his election to Parliament ...”

“... Surrender, the last of the Sword of Honour trilogy, ends with Crouchback’s brother-in-law Arthur Box-Bender noting not unresentfully that ‘things have turned out very conveniently for Guy.’ The same note of unexpectedness compounded of irony, farce and a tinge of shame is present in Segre’s rich and consummately-narrated ‘Italian ...”