“... to be comparative –     To set Narnia against the daily hum – I found living to be sadly short on narrative –     There were no wardrobes for an academic’s son.     Almost before I can remember I’d begun Seeing books as tempting doors marked EXIT Not as records of the heart, and trials that vex it. Of course my heart was not ...”

“... temples, housing the sacred relics of Presidential papers: the one for Kennedy in Boston stops short just this side of idolatry; Johnson’s in Texas goes well beyond it. But in England, the old genre has withered. Of recent Cabinet Ministers, only Ernest Bevin (two vols down, one to go) and Nye Bevan (canonised by Michael Foot) have received extended ...”

“... and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin series ‘The Other Europe’, but long unobtainable. (My own copy of it has gone missing, but I remember it as a slightly flowery rooming-house novel about zero-hour Poland.) It seems barbaric to ignore any books by a foreign ...”

“... include the images that originally accompanied the text, usually absent in reprints, and it has a short introduction by Catherine Grant that situates the essay for new readers. Each generation seems to need to discover ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ for itself, to work through its claims. But then art history is a discipline still shaped by ...”

“... their finest art and poetry’. Apollinaire’s activities took many forms: he edited a series of short-lived but radical journals; he wrote copious amounts of art criticism in praise of Picasso, Matisse, Delaunay, Rousseau and Braque; he issued Marinetti-style manifestos like ‘L’Antitradition Futuriste’, which champions dynamisme plastique and mots en ...”

“... justice has to be implemented in non-ideal circumstances. He gets to this conclusion via a very short argument, of the following form. Suppose that Anna Karenina is the ideal novel; this knowledge doesn’t put anyone in a position to appraise other, non-ideal books. Knowing that the Tolstoy is the ideal doesn’t help in deciding whether a Joanna Trollope ...”

“... Their subject, almost without exception, is the fading memory of some working-class youth, the short time they spent together, the sensual pleasure he came to experience, or never got to experience, and the brief moment of bliss that he despairs of ever knowing again. They tend to be marred by sentimentality, but when they work they have a toughness about ...”

“... the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with ...”

“... London in 1949, soon to study architectural history under Nikolaus Pevsner at the Courtauld. In short order Banham became an assistant editor at Architectural Review and a charter member of the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence ...”

“... no other European country has ever had to undergo. Germany’s bout was a violent – sharp and short – push forward into social and economic ‘modernity’, driving it for ever from the halfway house of Weimar, in a painful dismantling of structures of political domination and social solidarity, feudal fetters which had held back the country’s ...”

“... in postwar Bulgaria (though some sources say he briefly visited the Soviet Union in 1937, during a short phase of Oxford student communism). From 1948 to 1956 he served in the Foreign Office’s secret Information Research Department, whose purpose was both to gather information about the Soviet Union (especially its misdeeds), and to disseminate it – in ...”

“... about Papal finances in the middle of the 17th century, than Krautheimer can accommodate in one short chapter. Some of what needs to be said has in fact been said in a recent doctoral thesis on ‘Popes, Prelates and Bureaucrats’ by Pieter Rietbergen of the University of Nijmegen. The section which Rietbergen devotes to Alexander, Bernini and the ...”

“... was sacred. He admitted that he now had to wrestle with the notion of sacredness which, a short time before, he would have brusquely dismissed. Literature was necessary, he argued, but we should not call it sacred lest we ‘become what we oppose’. Ten months after this lecture was published Rushdie was meeting the Islamic scholars and affirming the ...”

“... in her desire not to offend. The Queen Mother is lovable, the Queen is firm but warm underneath, Philip is wise and manly, Charles is the best of fraternal chums. Charlotte M. Yonge could not invent a nicer family than these Windsors. Brayfield, not to put too fine a point on it, is just as terrified as anyone else by the horsewhip and the punitive libel ...”

“... had irresistible appeal. Linking the Biblical story of the baptism of the Ethiopian by Philip the Evangelist (Acts 8.27-40) with such texts as ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68.31), they marked out an alternative tradition to the one which condemned them, as sons of Ham, to be perpetual ‘servants of ...”