“... The current world record of 579.63 yards (512 yards of carry before the ball has even landed) is held by Kyle Berkshire. Internal and external mediation are fused in the YouTube video of the feat, which includes ball-tracking. Techno-narcissism’s circuit is complete. According to Oppenheim, Wodehouse didn’t even bother to count his strokes. For Berkshire ...”

“... her litany stated, Mirror of Justice, Cause of Our Joy, Spiritual Vessel, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven and Morning Star. Not a woman I liked, on the whole. She was the improbability at the heart of spiritual life; a paradox, unpollinated but fruitful, above nature yet also against nature. She could have ...”

“... It’s not that Ronald Reagan hasn’t got any ideas of his own,’ an American who held high office in the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter remarked recently. ‘The trouble is that he has such peculiar ones.’ He was referring to what has been officially termed the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) but what is much more appropriately called Star Wars ...”

“... to Hitler at the time of Munich. But the press was part of the fabric of a free society. It was held in trust for us all. The truth was rather different. Scott had acquired the Manchester Guardian in 1907 and henceforth it was ‘carried on as a public service and not for profit’. After his death, and with the Manchester Evening News to sustain its ...”

“... than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came from the late David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the board (his mother, Abby, was a co-founder of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul ...”

“... prop. It has passed through the levels of Eng Lit from the coal-owner’s estate in Lawrence to David Storey’s Radcliffe and homoerotic fumblings among the guy ropes. There is the same smack of Mosleyite fellow-travelling that Ishiguro exploits in The Remains of the Day. ‘Stand in the snug every Sunday after service, pull on his thumbs and brag about ...”

“... or the relative uprightness of the two institutions’ personnel. The military men and the bishops held radically divergent and even incommensurate notions about what constituted the normal and the deviant in matters of sex and gender, and this difference in outlook reflected profound divisions between them in social class as well as in – for lack of a ...”

“... in it or not’. Similarly, Cole’s Oxford colleague A.L. Rowse – then on the left – held views that Attlee found ‘infantile’. Dogged pragmatism, gardening and cricket were more his line; Nye Bevan carped that he brought ‘to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match’. The ...”

“... young Australian volunteers taken prisoner by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, are held for a while in an amusement park called The Great World. The real Great World, as it exists in Digger’s understanding, is, like the park, an imperfect representation of reality: ‘Digger was dizzied by the world. He could never, he felt, see it steady ...”

“... talent for making viscerally real what was for many readers the abstraction of slavery. As David Blight puts it in his excellent new biography, he ‘learned how to leave them weeping’.But the Narrative’s publication also threatened Douglass’s safety. He was still a slave who could legally be recaptured – easily, since the book identified him ...”

“... a value on titles,’ he purred, ‘and I go with the great stream of life.’ Another member was David Garrick, who grew up alongside Johnson in provincial Lichfield, and shot to prominence in his twenties for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the ...”

“... dictatorship of Napoleon III), while it makes little sense to say that the populist Nazis held aristocratic values and beliefs. Nevertheless, in the 1970s and 1980s this idea of modern German history swept all before it. As late as 1987, a doctoral dissertation at Bielefeld University on the Nazi policy of killing off the mentally ill ascribed the ...”

“... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...”

“... the violence, or starved back (miners got little strike pay and no state help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret Thatcher’s eventual victory enabled her to consolidate a free-market programme of deregulation that would soon merge with the wider international movement of neoliberalism. The ...”

“... Lawyers these days doubtless read John Mortimer, and dons read the new university wits like David Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper ...”