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“... England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily concerned with regime-level ...”

“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... I took out my mobile and opened the Audible app. A number of audiobooks were on offer at a special price. My mood called for something not-modern, something substantial; if the conference was to be the epic waste of time it promised to be, I would at least come back with some happy memory to show for it. Winter. Dickens. Yes. My finger hovered for a moment ...”

“... ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded. ‘Wagnerian’ has passed into our language as a byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the interminable.Wagner has kept me awake ...”

“... typically confronted with a pile of similar works – all marked at around the same relatively low price, say, $10 or $20 – and it is up to the collector with his or her magical trolling eye to extract the potential jewels from the dross. Some of my own greatest collecting moments occur when I uncover what I call an ‘accidental’ masterpiece – an ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... floated free of each other, and not only in the category of social housing. In the same year, the price of private flats for sale in Tower Hamlets went up by 5 per cent; in neighbouring Hackney, which has a similar demographic, it was a wild 15 per cent.There aren’t enough homes in Tower Hamlets. There aren’t enough homes in London, in the South-East, in ...”

“... from routine, institution and permanent attachment which he needed, without his having to pay the price of squalor and anarchy in return. What gives meaning to the volumes of notes and letters, dedications, memoirs and inscriptions in which all these relationships are preserved is Rilke’s preoccupation, not with himself, but with his poetry. His immense ...”

“... on campaigning for Brexit, his boss would insist in return that he resign from the government. The price of being allowed to remain in his job would be to make his one speech and leave it at that. He could vote for Brexit if he wanted but he couldn’t lead the charge for it. If he broke those rules, he would be fired. In other words, Gove was expecting ...”

“... their crowning glory: a marina fit for Abramovich and his cohorts. Or, more modestly, for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on their pleasure craft, the Kalizma. Sadly, that vision was premature. The proposed harbour for the Have-Yachts would have to wait. And move upstream.My somewhat distressed 1993 map had a magnificent but provisional set of ...”

“... a protocol, or draft treaty, was ready for signature in Montreal. The chief American negotiator, Richard Benedick, conceding that the science was still far from precise, pleaded for a rapid response. ‘If we are to err in designing measures to protect the ozone layer, then let us, conscious of our responsibility to future generations, err on the side of ...”

“... does not say. He writes: ‘The monstrous destructive force, the scale of our enterprise and the price paid for it by our poor, hungry, war-torn country, the casualties resulting from the neglect of safety standards and the use of forced labour in our mining and manufacturing activities, all these things inflamed our sense of drama and inspired us to make a ...”

“... confounded his public when, after a steady diet of Bach and Beethoven, he turned to composers like Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Grieg and Bizet, praising them to the skies and certainly above the pianistic romantics whom everyone else played. Even with Bach and Mozart, he chose tempi that defied convention and, since he played the same work differently on ...”

“... some recent scepticism. New attention has been paid to the political ambiguity of the class, and Richard Hamilton has argued that the Nazi electoral base owed less to the petty-bourgeoisie and more to the bourgeoisie proper than previously assumed. He analysed electoral districts and also made imaginative use of voting returns from fashionable holiday ...”

“... as if the word ‘economic’ was ‘economical’: if so, Londoners are still paying a high price for the error. The 1875 Public Health Act conferred a power to lay water mains on local authorities which supplied water – something they could not do unless they had first laid water mains. The courts cured this by deciding the Act meant what Parliament ...”