“... of the Headmaster, whose retirement is the occasion for the presentation of ‘Speak for England, Arthur’, the play within the play. The memoirs of T.E. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf occur in the original script and the visit to the country house on the eve of the First War, but these are presented as the memories of Hugh and Moggie, the upper-class couple ...”

“... of his countrymen and the conditions of the problem in India make men like him, perforce, little better than sympathetic spectators.’ The self-assertive anticolonial politics he envisioned weren’t intended to appeal to the British public. At the same time, he worried that Hardie, MacDonald and Nevinson would face an indifferent if not hostile ...”

“... it, all for the same reasons. Diane Arbus loved Freaks. She watched it ‘innumerable times’, Arthur Lubow writes in his biography, ‘often introducing people she knew to its pleasures’. ‘She said she had to see it every time it played,’ one of those friends recalled. As a photographer, Arbus liked taking pictures of those whom others believed to ...”

“... Politically, they were socialist, though, as Bhagwati says, in Thomas Balogh’s sense, not Arthur Lewis’s. (‘Tommy,’ the distinguished St Lucian economist is reported to have said, ‘the difference between your socialism and mine is that when you think of socialism you think of yourself as behind the counter, whereas when I think of socialism, I ...”

“... when we weren’t looking? They are ready for Woolf’s travesty of a biography, where ‘all the little figures – for they are rather under life size – will begin to move and speak, and we will arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant.’What is strange about such images isn’t just the extrapolation from fact to fiction, or ...”

“... to ask yet again how they are doing. If only they could text me. Or maybe leave a little message on my Facebook Wall. Self-destructive thoughts when forced to admit they can’t. Like Susan Boyle, all one wants is to have one’s little life back. B., thank god, seems fine. Calls frequently from Cambridge on ...”

“... In an article on Arthur Koestler written in 1944, George Orwell suggested that the lack of imaginative depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of, but it has made very little emotional impact ...”

“... the British client state of Portugal. But Napoleon, then at the height of his power, had little but scorn for a country he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to ...”

“... who could not afford a car, but had enough for the speedometer and the rear-view mirror,’ Arthur C. Clarke would remember. They constructed a ‘coelostat’, a device to stabilise the image of a spinning star-field. It was made from four mirrors and the motor of Clarke’s gramophone; it worked, and was proudly displayed in the Science Museum. The ...”

“... vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human ...”

“... the same as Le Goff), where the rusticus meets a devil, who remarks, Ego sum daemon, with very little more effect on the story than if he had said: Ego sum advocatus. Chaucer had to invent ‘The Friar’s Tale’ to explain that one, but at least the phenomenon is there. In the same way, when Le Goff broods on ‘the alimentary code’ of Erec et ...”

“... when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of ...”

“... and unsuspecting, openness offers joys which our involuntarily closed culture can have little or no idea of. It was such an openness which made the Victorian novel the richest, most seductive, most exciting in the history of the genre. It also, in Gay’s view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young ...”

“... of serial technique, though admitted that the music he got it from – Schoenberg et al – meant little to him emotionally or aesthetically. It seemed to be the only acceptable way of writing music in the American academic world of the early 1950s. Glass claims he knew little about the modernists who weren’t writing ...”

“... were given titbits to eat by their Irish tenants, who felt sorry for them. Like children in an Arthur Ransome or C.S. Lewis novel, they rambled unnoticed around the great house and were given to taking off on their bicycles up the main road to the nearby town. It is well known in the world of fairytale and post-Freudian analysis that it is not a good thing ...”