“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and intolerance, its suspicion of those who stand outside the ‘movement’. He twice quotes Arthur Henderson as saying that the plural of conscience is conspiracy (a statement new to me and I suspect of doubtful provenance). But, as Marquand knows, Henderson is the man who in 1918 wanted to rename the Labour Party the People’s Party, who freely ...”

“... in his ‘Peter Simple’ role, is more like the original prophet Nathan, telling an interesting little fable which abruptly concludes with a fierce, authoritative denunciation of his audience: ‘Thou art the man!’ (II Samuel xii 7). Young Michael was brought up vaguely C of E (like both his parents) and did not feel that the potent Hebraic name of Nathan ...”

“... of wagons, their occupants locked in some obscure struggle of their own, would have presented little problem to a marauding Zulu impi, unless that of throwing its assegais straight while doubled up with laughter. It is more plausible to take the scrum as the most explicit physical expression of the male bonding which Making Men sees at the heart of its ...”

“... Once upon a time there was a little girl who, at the age of two, had in some fashion to be told that her father had just cut off the head of the beautiful mother who used to lavish affection on her, and pretty clothes. Shortly afterwards the child learned that, although she retained contact with him, she had been officially repudiated as her father’s daughter, even if she probably had to wait a while before having it explained that this occurred because her mother had been accused both of adultery and incest ...”

“... a photograph of the vase on which that restoration was to be based. It was a method that allowed little room for disagreement – in a footnote Beard tells us that the limestone fragments have since been restored rather differently. The forward-driving logic of this teaching technique is also characteristic of Harrison’s scholarly writing, where she wheels ...”

“... did he put it to the premier – Asquith had succeeded Campbell-Bannerman in 1908 – who had little choice but to accede. Already convinced that only he could win the war, he doubtless understood that he couldn’t hope to push Asquith aside without help – which Bonar Law was to provide. He put himself at the centre of the war effort, first as minister ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his notorious surname associates him with criminality in the neighbourhood. ‘When he was little, Carney and his father played a game where he had to guess whether or not Mike was wearing his revolver under his pants leg. For a long time, he thought it was his father’s attempt to get close to him, bleak as it was. Now he was sure Mike was merely ...”

“... who were fed this tale (reinforced by Back-Room Boy, the propaganda comedy of 1942, starring Arthur Askey and set in a lighthouse). Maskelyne, whose Magic Gang never existed outside his memoirs, was of little practical use to the camouflage unit to which he was seconded, but was nevertheless encouraged, for a time at ...”

“... 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 ...”