“... Peel’s rapid fall. In recent years, aspirants to the role, like Michael Heseltine and Theresa May, have spent Friday evenings eating and drinking with Conservative constituency associations on the ‘rubber chicken circuit’. This interaction is much more than gestural; so is the requirement that the party leader face backbenchers regularly at the 1922 ...”

“... re-establish order in the troops’ – a euphemism, probably, for shooting his own men. He may or may not have participated in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s freebooting occupation of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and his cohorts seized the town for fifteen months in the name of free love, anti-feminism and publicly ...”

“... a very nice place you can stay.’ She caught herself and smiled at this weak stab at PR. Merkel may be the only remaining major politician in the West with a capacity for irony: she often seems to be suppressing an inward smile. The audience appeared eager that she leave the stage so they could hear from the gold-medal kayaker. Only when Merkel walked ...”

“... of Independence that didn’t need to specify that only white men were created equal. Humiliation may also have had something to do with this failure of comprehension. France, routed, was forced into a firesale of the Louisiana Territory, a lacklustre end to Napoleon’s western ambitions. (Britain, for its part, lost sixty thousand men in its attempt to gain ...”

“... does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, often quoted as ...”

“... missiles and bombers should target enemy nuclear forces rather than cities. Counterforce may appear sane when compared with the lunatic destruction favoured by previous plans, but the new proposals were potentially no less deadly: should the negotiations that were supposed to accompany strikes on missile installations and airfields fail, the ...”

“... that his preferences and impatiences seldom disturb any reader not out for a quarrel. We may doubt on principle that Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926) could be ‘completely objective’ in its depictions, but our guide’s belief in the validity of a neutral authorial stance allows him to get close to a practical transparency – not a bad trait ...”

“... got to get them out of here.’ And my grandmother, whatever reassuring fictions she may have told her children, took her jewellery with her, and ordered the maid servants to pack a trunk of family valuables. Some shadow passed across her mind, and she took precautions, and that is why there is a silver ewer and basin in my house, one piece of ...”

“... of an ambitious bureaucrat. The cause was Freud’s: Jones had simply made the arrangements. Jones may be more than the straight man in the double-act of these letters, and in the tortured history of psychoanalysis, but what the correspondence does reveal is the sado-masochism of his relationship with Freud. By the same token it also reveals the new genre of ...”

“... In this way, he ‘mixed personal and public metaphors, signs and symbols, words and icons’. He may have ‘climbed out of modernism’, but his performances depended upon the hushed veneration – or critical cowardice – expected in the white-walled sanctuaries of modern art. Would he have earned such applause in the theatre? What would be the reaction ...”

“... capital to be raised by a candidate who exploited the resentment engendered by defeat. (He may have had in mind the efficacy of the ‘who lost China?’ fantasy of the Fifties, but I don’t think that the ‘stab in the back’ psychosis of his German boyhood can have been far from his mind either.) At all events, the year 1968 found him advising the ...”

“... that Riding had had a peculiar accent: ‘Perhaps Polish Jew?’ Deborah Baker suggests that it may have been her self-consciousness about her accent that caused Riding, many years later, to talk about poetry as a place ‘where the fear of speaking in strange ways could be left behind’ and ‘as a way of speaking differently from the untidy speaking ways ...”

“... books to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, from the Baedeker to the Bible. The works of other novelists may prove, as the phrase would have it, more humanly satisfying than his, but Pynchon chooses to use his immense talents as a writer and encyclopedist to show why he cannot offer satisfactions of that kind. His jaunty complaints in the Introduction that the ...”

“... Cardiff, is couched in rhyme royal, a stanza which is a Manx-cat version of ottava rima, though it may well predate it, having been used by Chaucer. Auden also decided on rhyme royal for ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, probably to avoid too direct a comparison with Byron and the Italians. James writes: Now I myself, though full-time a pop lyricist, Have found the ...”

“... concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may have been more inventive, with their Handful of Pleasant Delights and Paradise of Dainty Devices, but an apologetic impulse remains apparent in the way they name miscellanies. How much has changed? We read The Golden Treasury or, as indicatively, The Rattle ...”