“... verdicts – although these latter, publicly pronounced, might be negated in private later on. Arthur O’Shaughnessy (a fellow-worker in the Museum, and the poet who believed that deathless ditties build up the world’s great cities) is ‘the most blameless of gentle spirits’ and also ‘that poor idiot’. These are not quite irreconcilable ...”

“... oral history ward. If the old identify too closely with the ideas and emotions of the past, the young have difficulty in understanding them at all. If their politics descend from the radicalism of the 1970s, they find the assumptions of someone like Attlee or Bevin antiquated and hard to explain historically. How could a left-wing government have invested ...”

“... another chapter in the “God-that-failed” saga’. That, I think, is unfair. Unlike Arthur Koestler, Camus was not performing a public autocritique of his past as a Communist, but trying to put utopian politics in its place. ‘Politics,’ he insisted, ‘is not a religion; if it becomes one it becomes an inquisition.’ Only those who believe ...”

“... and colleges; and who is going to care any longer if the cobwebbed texts set before the nation’s young rather signally fail to display ‘largeness of soul’? One who will care is John Lucas, who thinks that ‘the 1960s witnessed a disaster for English education, one we are still living through and from which we may never entirely recover,’ and ...”

“... Teishi became an empress in 990, at the age of 14, when her father was appointed regent to the young emperor. But by the time Shonagon arrived, in 993, Teishi’s power was already in decline, along with her father’s; in 995 the regent died and two of Teishi’s brothers were exiled.This is the world that Shonagon writes from and ...”

“... As soon as they got back from their honeymoon Monroe told a friend, ‘I’m going to marry Arthur Miller,’ and eventually she did. She left DiMaggio when he beat her up after she’d filmed the scene in The Seven-Year Itch where her dress is blown up over her head as she stands on a subway grate. Yet, almost incredibly, DiMaggio does not come off ...”

“... can be seen to have ‘the precision of cooked spaghetti’. A more recent American aesthetician, Arthur Danto, is one of those who make the impossible claim that their experience of art is more valuable than any that could be derived from the ‘kitsch or sentimental outpourings’ which other people enjoy. Behind the claims, variously stated, for ‘high ...”

“... their own benefit. None of these, though, is representative of his profession – and only people young enough to be cynical believe them to be so. The number of dishonest scientists cannot, of course, be known, but even if they were common enough to justify scary talk of ‘tips of icebergs’ they have not been so numerous as to prevent science’s having ...”

“... John Hayne of Exeter pursued Susan Henley with godly vigour in 1634: his presents included Arthur Hildersham’s Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk garters. A wedding was more than a private transaction: the banns were asked three times before the assembled congregation, seeking ...”

“... the Communists, CND and (more frequently, more satisfyingly) real people – General Galtieri, Arthur Scargill, Ken Livingstone, Gerry Adams, Colonel Gaddafi, even (though they were beginning to scrape the barrel) President Delors. Peter Preston may not be in quite this league, more a domestic Jean-Luc Dehaene, but at least he is unequivocally an ...”

“... as early as 1940, when Chamberlain and the arch-appeasers were branded ‘the guilty men’ by a young Michael Foot and two other socialist polemicists. They overstated what was an arguable case, that the executors of appeasement’s closing phase had been arrogant, ignorant and insensitive; which naturally bred a counter-argument to the effect that they had ...”

“... myth in Greece,’ the Greek National Tourism Office urges us. This summer’s posters feature a young couple, children running along the beach behind them, while an anonymous columned temple hovers implausibly in the Aegean haze. Greece, it seems, has no history except ancient history. In Turkey, too, you can swim in the morning, and climb up to the theatre ...”

“... of the land, by listening to the stories told about it. ‘I am a lexical cartographer,’ Jay Arthur writes. ‘I “map” through language, through the words that have accumulated about particular places. These “maps” are the conjunctions of the physical world and the imagination, a way of seeing a landscape, or, more precisely, a collection of ways ...”

“... violence. I have a sense that for some hapless, underemployed and spiritually ill-schooled young Muslims, the Koran is a style accessory that goes hand in hand with martial arts training and watching videos of aeroplanes being blown up. On the other hand, there are those Western infidels, whose reading background is mostly in fiction, who pick up an ...”

“... distorted reflections of lacquered doors. I first met the hyacinthine, ringleted, foggyvoiced young Guibert through Foucault in 1983. He was perhaps Foucault’s best friend. Although Foucault liked working with women (Arlette Farge was a favourite), he didn’t like socialising with them; once I invited Susan Sontag to dinner and he hissed at me when she ...”