“... extinguished the genre. Yeats tries to revive it in his sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, but his theme – the decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy – and his too muscle-bound style always remind me of Stormont. It’s Protestant arrogance with a touch of Mussolini (or ‘Missolonghi’, as Yeats called him). But he gets it right in ‘In ...”

“... who didn’t do anything about her little brown teeth. In that respect they’re like the working-class people who love them.’ ‘They can’t help it,’ I said. ‘Yes they can. They’re just out of touch. Everybody’s got fabulous teeth now. Diana had great teeth. These skinny men are all a terrible throwback.’ ‘With bad teeth.’ ‘Yeah. Toilet ...”

“... was a cheesy international success, but the follow-up, Carte Blanche, degenerated into a tug of war as Tynan refused to heed the requests, suggestions and anguished pleas of those who wanted him to cut his own contribution, a playlet called ‘Triangle’, which, they said, didn’t fit the revue format and brought everything to a talky stop. Tynan was ...”

“... powers of explanation and illumination. It is sad to realise that his is no longer a (middle-class) household name. This popularising suggests in flickers what his more formal essays, decidedly not written for the general music-lover, achieve with mastery: an overview of the language and workings of classical tonality that remains unequalled in lucid ...”

“... or fugitive publishers, Williams won coterie acclaim by the end of the 1920s, and after World War Two, with much wider support from critics and trade publishers, he became a pre-eminent influence on all sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a ...”

“... the world go round. Mandeville makes it clear that he is thinking of the way that wild young upper-class males, out on the town, promote the circulation of wealth. The antinomy is between virtuous frugality on the one hand, and luxury on the other, where luxury still carries its old close association with lechery, and such luxury is not exactly identifiable ...”

“... control. Congress can neither limit the effect of his pardon, nor exclude from its exercise any class of offenders. The benign prerogative of mercy reposed in him cannot be fettered by any legislative restrictions. It was described in 1871 as a power granted ‘without limit’. Later, in 1925, Chief Justice Taft spoke for a unanimous court in a case of ...”

“... understanding, and opened my eyes to what can go on between two men of different ages and class and character: At that self same instant that M. de Charlus passed through the gateway whistling like a fat bumblebee, another one, a real one this time, entered the courtyard. Who knows whether it was not the one so long awaited by the orchid, that had ...”

“... mother as kind and stoical, a maker of puddings and cheesecakes who came into her own during the war when she knitted socks for the troops. She knitted Betty an oatmeal and orange cardigan which she wore for thirty years. After Veda died, Betty arranged for thousands of daffodils to be planted in the grounds of the local primary school for the children to ...”

“... de menthe. We had to dance with her father, who’d been wounded as a sapper in the First World War: either he had his “arms” on, with black gloves, or he couldn’t be bothered to put them on and we just had to dance with the stumps.’Miss Popham, the headmistress of Cheltenham College, ‘during a Scripture lesson on the First Book of Samuel, went on ...”

“... died at the age of seven. His father died soon after, leaving enough money for an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Dahl was then only three. He survived the beatings and misery of an English boarding school and got a job with Shell. When war broke out he volunteered as a fighter pilot. He had a bad crash-landing in Libya ...”

“... that overdiagnosis is a sign of a broken welfare system that is creating what Farage calls a ‘class of victims’, but you could argue just as easily that it is a consequence of free-market ideology. Annemarie Mol, a Dutch philosopher, writes in The Logic of Care (2008) that patients are harmed when a ‘logic of choice’ supplants a ‘logic of ...”

“... or no acquaintance with Roussel’s oeuvre’. Written about an artist who did not ‘class himself as belonging to any school’, it is, aptly enough (and not only because it is the first analysis in English of Roussel and his work since Rayner Heppenstall’s short and now wholly superseded 1966 volume), a book in a ...”

“... teacher, I haven’t yet adopted the practice of the ‘pronoun round’: going around a class or tutorial asking for everyone’s preferred pronouns. My reasoning has been that the respectful way to address someone in the third person in their presence is by using their name, as in: ‘Does anyone have an answer to Mary’s excellent ...”

“... locked in a struggle for business on the streets of the Netherlands, part of a fratricidal postal war across northern Europe from which Royal Mail – soon, if the government gets its way, to be privatised like its Dutch and German peers – is not immune. Privatising old state post companies doesn’t necessarily make it easier for rivals to compete with ...”