“... can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the cross. ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ – this ...”

“... appointed to a post in the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy, responsible for tutorial classes across a broad area of East Sussex, and he remained an adult education tutor till his return to Cambridge and a lectureship in the English faculty in 1961. Williams seems to have been respected by his fellow tutors, but also to have been a man apart; friendly, but with ...”

“... news of 1848 initially prompted scenes of euphoria in the great American cities. There was broad support in the Senate for a motion by Senator William Allen (Ohio) that the Senate formally congratulate the French people ‘upon their success in their recent efforts to consolidate liberty by imbodying [sic] its ...”

“... be sure, Lohmann defeats Baum; but Lohmann himself is left without any halo … His victory lacks broad moral significance. As so often with Lang, the law triumphs and the lawless glitters. This anti-Nazi film betrays the power of Nazi spirit over minds insufficiently equipped to counter its peculiar fascination.Lohmann is the detective who tracks Mabuse down ...”

“... It is this aspect of the paedophile predicament which is so sympathetically captured by William Golding in his portrait of Mr Pedigree, the poor benighted soul who haunts the municipal parks of Greenfield in Darkness Visible. Mr Pedigree is described as ‘stuck like a broken gramophone record’. Carpenter’s insistence on researching the last ...”

“... been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the capacity of the State to reduce social injustice, expand the economy and create a fuller and more spacious life for all’. Labour’s victory in ...”

“... of the world? Do we imagine that we can be carried forward indefinitely upon the shoulders – broad though they be – of the United States of America? The time had come, he said, for those questions to be answered. In his experience of large enterprises, Churchill had found it was ‘often a mistake to try to settle everything at once’. Just as he was ...”

“... Ancient initiation rites and schizophrenic delusions. Freud, of course, but also Bergson, William James and Count Keyserling. Mandalas, yoga and the I Ching, plus warnings to the Western mind about becoming too deeply immersed in Eastern practices. Archetypes, psychological types and, regrettably, racial types. Wotan until the reader is woozy. And we ...”

“... Guns of August; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. On every side you can hear Kennedy’s voice: ‘Let the word go forth ... that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.’ It is repeated over and over. There are panels of pictures, with text, all around. This must be what is ...”

“... nicknamed ‘Japan Inc’. This can be a flexible and effective system provided there is a broad consensus about its aims, as in the 1960s, when almost all Japanese saw that only by expanding their export markets could they replace Japan’s lost empire. Negotiated in bars and geisha houses by boozy men who were at school and university together (and ...”

“... Nicholas published in Environmental Research Letters in which the researchers considered ‘a broad range of individual lifestyle choices’ and came up with recommendations for four ‘high impact’ actions which had ‘the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions’. These were, in ascending order of ...”

“... a motoring journalist who hates ‘CND lesbians’ can come at you with the moral authority of William Hazlitt. Last year a petition was handed in to Downing Street demanding that Clarkson be made prime minister: it had 49,500 signatures. It is not easy to think of a time when the British car industry was not in a state of some kind: a state of ...”

“... John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays ...”

“... cataract and glade, for long drifting walks through the night, as when Dorothy Wordsworth and William and Coleridge set out to watch the moon rise over the Severn. The association with the country as an authentic native place, defined by appealing local idiosyncrasies, becomes key to the word’s peregrinations. The literary scholar Kathryn Sutherland ...”

“... memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a future in which figures like Cardinal Ratzinger, William F. Buckley Jr and Jesse Helms would be held to account for the hatefulness of their pronouncements about people with Aids. ACT UP New York was founded in March 1987, but perhaps sparked as much as founded, thanks to the now-or-never rhetoric of the ...”