“... then we would all be living in a different ‘possible world’ – a world that contains not me, freely choosing a day in the library, but someone else, exactly like me except for deciding to spend the day at home. And if we accept that the actual world is the creation of a wise and benevolent God, then we have to recognise that it must contain the greatest ...”

“... was referring to the ‘Quarterly Journal of Socialist Humanism’ launched by E.P. Thompson and John Saville in 1957 as a forum for what they called ‘Britain’s largest unorganised party – the ex-communist party’. The New Reasoner ran to ten issues before being absorbed into the fledgling New Left Review, and it included a memorable essay by ...”

“... books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite ...”

“... Fielding’s career, and information on Fielding’s Classical and other sources, which have been freely plundered by his detractors. He also wrote better than many of his rivals, and readers of the latest life may feel in this regard that the competition hasn’t exactly been hotting up. Facts about Fielding’s life have always been relatively sparse, for a ...”

“... too good to resist. ‘This officer of artillery never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example ...”

“... history that displays her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole ...”

“... book – might like to know where it came from. Shaw produced no formal autobiography but wrote freely about himself – for instance, in long patiently buoyant letters to the haplessly aspiring Professor Demetrius O’Bolger of Philadelphia, and in fake interviews, as well as in some of his published writings. There is also the shorthand diary he kept for ...”

“... in these programmes, ‘we had arrived big-time on the political scene.’ Adams and the SDLP’s John Hume together worked out the theological basis for what, after many drafts, was to become the British-Irish Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 – the document which paved the way for the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. The programmes give most of the ...”

“... offering a service people really want. Otherwise they will be reduced to the didactic posture of John Reith or Matthew Arnold, pretending to know better than people themselves what is good for them. This idea, in the Thatcherite spring of the 1980s, lent pro-market advocacy its anti-elitist patina. The efficiency argument is just as familiar. Take a ...”

“... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...”

“... There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the ...”

“... Isleworth Crown Court was persuaded that the sex workers organised themselves co-operatively and freely. When the ECP was founded in 1975, they argued that housewives should stand with sex workers: ‘All women benefit from prostitutes’ successful attempts to receive cash for sexual work, because the cash makes it clear that women are working when we are ...”

“... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...”

“... distance frightened them all, even Carlyle’s mother: ‘We had all to complain that we durst not freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in . . . it seemed as if an atmosphere of Fear repelled us from him.’ The centre of Carlyle’s emotional world was his mother. It was to her that he confided the disquiets of his honeymoon, about her illnesses ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”