“... world, at speed, the river beneath, always trying to beat his record,With me beside him in that self-same seat, the blur of tail fins, cables, skyThrough that curvilinear windshield, across bridges for the most part, but not just.Every year Murph would flip cars, trading in the 88 for a 98 Custom Sports Coup,345 horsepower Starface engine, dual rear ...”

“... by a few stern words from Andy McNab (‘Gulf War hero and ex-SAS man’); a severe and self-congratulatory leader reminded readers that ‘this is the third time the Sun has planted a “bomb” at the heart of a supposedly ultra-secure zone.’ If The Investigator ‘had been a terrorist, the third in line to the throne could have been dead by ...”

“... economically in the words ‘uncouth of speech’. The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of ...”

“... Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary kook’, as a haunted-looking man who was friendly to children. One visitor to ...”

“... that they are willing to wolf them down by the millions. (It’s a subject in its own right, the self-reinforcing phenomenon of the contemporary mega-seller; by which I mean not just the garden variety bestseller but the book or books which go to that mysterious other place in the popular consciousness, when it’s as if reading them has somehow been made ...”

“... what alternative concepts they would recommend, they usually reply that the question is premature. Self-criticism must come first. We need to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, or to become aware of the repressive character of the most benevolent-looking of contemporary institutions, or to see the distortions induced by innocuous-seeming linguistic ...”

“... later shaken and depleted, but optimistic in the belief that depression in most cases was ‘self-limiting’ and eventually runs its course ‘until the victim comes out the other end of his nightmare more or less intact. In the meantime, however, it’s Auschwitz time in the heart of the soul – a form of madness I wouldn’t wish upon a literary ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big ...”

“... moment in a verbal contest, a gaudy, point scoring mockery against the serious-mindedness of Sir Robert Peel or, later, Gladstone. Byron’s is itinerant, physical, and (perhaps most distinctively) shuns the maternal and the doting for the anti-familial, for the generosity of pure sexual scandal. Disraeli, hermaphroditically gliding between his exotic ...”

“... be ‘more positively on the side of authority’, and professed himself ‘disgusted by their self-satisfied attitude’. One BBC programme was denounced as a ‘party political broadcast for the IRA … glorifying violence and fostering a new generation of killers’. Similar comments were made throughout the conflict by spokesmen for both major ...”

“... years was regarded by friend and enemy alike as just too damaged – charmless, pompous and self-obsessed – ever to play a useful role again. The same day – 15 September – had made Lyttelton a hero: fighting a few hundred yards away from Macmillan and Crookshank, he won the DSO, although the VC might have been appropriate. He fought on until April ...”

“... with an irrational persistence, generating cranky and parochial treatises on economics as well as self-serving defences of slavery. By the 1860s, Southerners had become so set in their backwardness that only a calamitous war could break the grip of the old ideas. Given such an unpromising landscape, who would want to read an intellectual history of the ...”

“... or I find I lose ground ‘I am nothing, if not critical.’ The predicament is one which Robert Hughes shares with Hazlitt, of whom Keats gamely wrote: ‘if ever I am damn’d – damn me if I shouldn’t like him to damn me.’ In Culture of Complaint (a bestseller in the US), Hughes damns damn near everybody. He follows the uncompromising American ...”

“... house in Stratford, fussing with his lawyers over the disposition of an ample estate, the private self revealed in the Sonnets safely back in the closet. If we think of the end of Marlowe’s career we see a dangerously, glamorously mixed-up 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last ...”

“... considering what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days. It self-consciously repudiates the credentials of academic scholarship; it disparages the narrow technical expertise of the policy wonk; it cannot rest on the standing of achievement as a politician or novelist. In other words, it has nothing to declare but its ...”