“... the political scandals of the early 1990s, the counter-revolution was swift and brutal. Berlusconi took power, the judges were tamed and many investigations simply petered out. As recent scandals in the business world have shown – above all the collapse of the dairy company Parmalat in circumstances similar to the collapse of Enron – corrupt systems of ...”

“... about. Yesterday’s bourgeois media correspondent becomes today’s revolutionary press officer. John Reed was not the first or the last journalist to follow this trajectory. But he remains the most spectacular. He went to report Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, made straight for the Petrograd Bolsheviks and became a denizen of the seething ...”

“... a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful ...”

“... John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906-92) was a devotee of the poetry of A.E. Housman. He wrote a vivid introduction to Housman’s verse, whose tight control, both of metre and of homosexual passion, found obvious echoes in his own character. Sparrow was also co-author of A.E. Housman: An Annotated Hand-List, one of the few excursions into modern bibliography made by this great collector, 17th century bibliographer and connoisseur of Renaissance Latin, who counselled aspiring bibliomaniacs: (1) never lend anyone a book; (2) never sell a book; (3) never give anyone a book; (4) never read a book ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes, grandson of the minister of the Bunyan chapel at Bedford, was born into a religious tradition that for two hundred years had stopped its ears against the blandishments of Mr Worldly Wiseman and sought only the Celestial City of Eternal Life. The City was to be found, as all readers of Pilgrim’s Progress knew, not by piety or public-spiritedness or good works or moral behaviour, but by that indefinable state of inner consciousness known as Salvation by Faith ...”

“... This, finally and belatedly, is a justification for Fifa’s policy of expanding the Cup. They took the number of teams up to 24 in 1982; the reasons were essentially political, to do with soliciting votes from the Third World. The result was 1. that there were too many duff teams and 2. there was a problem in then reducing the numbers to 16 for the ...”

“... the relations between authors and publishers never change. Dear Mr Murray, edited by David McClay (John Murray, £16.99), a collection of letters written to six generations of the Murray family, is full of familiar complaints. Jane Austen was ‘very much disappointed … by the delays of the printers’. Maria Rundell, author of A New System of Domestic ...”

“... come home to tidy the porch, and Nixon was every part in The Godfather rolled into one. But it took Ronald Reagan to drive the matter past the point of absurdity: president of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as star of Bedtime for Bonzo. The person who today seems most like a real President is Martin Sheen, who plays one in The West Wing.1 George ...”

“... the time I met the leopard the gold had faded to beige and the black spots to donkey-brown. Once I took the photos into primary school, thinking to impress the girls with the exoticism of my family history. It didn’t go as I’d hoped. It wasn’t that they mocked the notion of an undersized ten-year-old in grey flannel shorts and National Health Service ...”

“... disposition of his breast’, in reply to a defence against More’s retort to an earlier tract by John Frith. Frith was only a late intervener in a battle that had been joined since 1528, in which year More, chartered by his old friend Cuthbert Tunstal, who was also his bishop, had begun to read and to refute the ‘pestilent books’ of Luther’s English ...”

“... Salvidge and Sir Thomas White. Even Labour followed the example thus set, in the person of John Braddock, a founder member of the Communist Party who lapsed into respectability. Perhaps one should include his wife Bessie in the list. Equally special was the composition of the Liverpool electorate in its changing form. Religion, or, as Waller’s title ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While negotiations were going on at Mile ...”

“... was a fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black ...”

“... the end to more than the first and definitively gripping impression. It is possible that Kipling took such things more lightly than his critics. He could certainly be extraordinarily careless, as when, in the flawed but fascinating story ‘Wireless’, he himself misquotes ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (‘moonlight’ instead of ‘moonshine’), which a ...”

“... of other kinds.In the event, Flanigan tells us, Cambridge did not attack Christiana, because she took another road that day. ‘Thus thwarted in his views of obtaining revenge, his designs upon Mr Brown gained double hold.’ Unaware of the fate awaiting him, the overseer rode home, and was struck down between two fields of sugar cane. ‘The negroes say ...”