“... declared, people would undoubtedly address a boy wearing such a jacket as ‘Buttons’. He may well have been thinking of Buttons the page in the pantomime version of Cinderella. In America, too, the pages or ‘call boys’ whose instant availability was crucial to the smooth functioning of office block, luxury hotel and legislative chamber alike ...”

“... man, less cocksure and more wary, wanting to do some good and make a difference, but afraid it may be too late. The Friends of Harry Perkins traces his rise from the backbenches to the brink of Downing Street. The time frame for this is deliberately confusing. As Mullin tells us in his preface, the new book is set in a future that overlaps with the recent ...”

“... sums it up nicely: the villagers, he says, were ‘vainly attempting to restore a lost world which may never have existed’. The economic aspects of that struggle we are better able to understand, in all their complexity, after reading this book. What we are still no better able to understand is the sort of thing that happened at Datchet, near Windsor, in ...”

“... they’re from British Rail, and I’m left reflecting that in a year or two one or other of them may well be writing me (like his counterparts in electricity and water before him) to offer me shares in Rail-North or BritTrak. I’ll reply in righteous fury, How can you find it in your conscience to sell off the commonweal? He’ll reply wearily and almost ...”

“... his voice and said ‘Sir, you and I have sat here with a board between us now for 27 years. May I venture to ask your name?’ The reply from the other side of the board was: ‘Sir, you’re a very impertinent fellow.’ The ingredients are good enough, but the finished product puts one in mind of a tasty bread made without enough yeast. Langford’s ...”

“... the intriguingly subversive suggestion that the formidable Catholic dévote, Madame de Maintenon, may have had a hand in composing L’Ecole des filles. Pornography knows no party-line, and is as much the preserve of aristocratic libertines as of zealous anti-court satirists. What are we to make of all those Restoration tributes to Charles II’s saucy ...”

“... wrote, ‘but starts rather from an inner fact of his individual consciousness.’ These two views may not be contradictory for most poets, but they are problematic in the case of MacDiarmid because he had been built from the outside in. In 1939, MacDiarmid wrote to an aspiring writer who had sent him some poems: so far from producing poetry you seem to me to ...”

“... of the governing assumptions about intellectuals, but it doesn’t square with the facts. France may be a special case, especially France between the 1930s and the 1950s, but the British situation should be regarded as ‘one distinctive variant of a larger international pattern’. Germany, Russia, Italy and the United States, among others, share with ...”

“... to take their own cars with them. Readers eager for a feel of steamy, seamy Havana in the 1950s may feel English takes too long to get there, then skimps a little on the detail. But what he does offer provides plenty of scope for extrapolation. There was the legendary Tropicana, located in a jungle outside Havana, with its scantily clad dancers and lavish ...”

“... David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal portrait is so convincing that it is hard to see an official biography adding more than superfluous detail. He brings us close to the living temper of a poet who is still fairly unknown to English-speakers but who, through his impact on T ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... by Hollywood (Joanne Harris’s backlist, incidentally, is selling like hot chocolate), help may still be at hand in the form of literary prizes. The Booker, which despite Martin Amis’s best protests still considers itself ‘Britain’s most prestigious literary accolade’ (whatever that means), won’t be bestowed until 17 October, and the shortlist ...”

“... to be put to the question. Music to John Reid’s ears that would have been. Reid’s ambition may well be to establish himself as New Labour’s most illiberal home secretary yet. Such an aspiration means of course having to out-Blunkett Blunkett, and that is a stiff call. Reid no doubt knew when he spoke in Manchester that his predecessor was on the ...”

“... for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light.’ This may be an extreme position, but given a well-organised institutional or doctrinal subculture and a relatively small nation-state, it is by no means fanciful to imagine that ideas can be passed around and down in more or less unmodified form. Such, for Rose, is ...”

“... years has been the miserable lot of successive Princes of Wales. To Edward VII and Prince Charles may be added the names of every long-suffering heir since the Hanoverians took over: George II, George IV and Edward VIII, not forgetting poor Prince Frederick, the son of George II and father of George III, who did not survive to reign at all. Whatever their ...”