“... so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of the Pre-Raphaelites’ (Burne-Jones breathes a sigh of relief), but ‘the nearest painting can get to bad breath’. Freud was always a painter of the Great Indoors. Even his horses are painted at home in their stables; and though he curated a great Constable show in Paris in 2003, the ...”

“... John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these degraded creatures was owing entirely to their poverty,’ the magistrate admitted. ‘They were unable to pay for privacy, and the ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”

“... fate. The centralisation is one of the principal things that attracts freebooting tycoons like Sir James Dyson and Sir Jim Ratcliffe, along with the press barons, to the Brexit cause. As Rupert Murdoch, always more candid than his fellows, once remarked, the trouble with the EU was that you never knew who to call.All of Oborne’s books have been published in ...”

“... dismissive though faintly technical-sounding ‘pervert’ is pervasive. ‘PC Burton said he knew Jones as a convicted pervert,’ we read in an early newspaper report – the word trenchant but fastidious, declining to engage in the niceties of just what he was convicted of. The distaste it conveys is summed up by the awful Winterton when he says: ‘I ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... remained faithful to those consciences. I have been claiming that figures like Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Proust and Wittgenstein illustrate what I called ‘freedom as the recognition of contingency’. Such freedom, I would now claim, is integral to the idea of a liberal society. In order to show how the charge of relativism looks against this ...”

“... of fun) who keeps cropping up in memoirs of the Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social scene, setting hearts ...”

“... the literary level a similar puzzlement seems in order. What about the weird country depicted in James Kelman’s stories, for example, where demotic-proletarian saints find themselves forever knackered by sadist-authoritarian bullies or preached at in Malcolm Rifkind English by bien pensant hypocrites and child molesters? One easy answer now itself a form ...”

“... we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to fight’ in Iraq. I heard him say: ‘You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling.’ I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had created his own intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch, ‘designed to operate ...”

“... First Letter to the Corinthians, the passage about love, with Father Jolliffe opting for the King James version using charity. He took time at the start of the reading to explain to the congregation that charity was love and not anything to do with flag days or people in doorways. Or if it was to do with people in doorways that was only one of its ...”