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“... political career. This has all the fascination of political biography for those of us who, in Michael Oakeshott’s feline phrase, ‘cannot live without the illusion of affairs’ – even if our experience must perforce be vicarious as well as illusory. No reader of such pages in the early months of 1986 will be surprised to find that unresolved ...”

“... relating to that change is wrongly described by Ashton as a dispute within the Livery over the powers exercised by the Court of Assistants. In fact, the Livery was not divided and the dispute was not about the Court of Assistants. The conflict concerned the struggle of the ‘young men’ outside the Livery for constitutional and financial benefits, and ...”

“... his career was a slippery mixture of principled conviction and clever accommodation to the ruling powers. There is a curious moment in his preface where he goes out of his way to assert that Virgil was ‘still of republican principles in his heart’. He then contrives to make Augustus sound like a constitutional monarch and so edges a step closer to the new ...”

“... of post-Reform Bill politics is the quite unexpected emergence of a kind of radical Tory populism. Michael Foot is reported as saying of this welcome rediscovery: ‘To read the book is to be convinced as well as enraptured.’ It would be interesting to know what his present opponents might make of it. One way of writing a ‘political novel’ is to proceed ...”

“... capable of surprisingness, there is always more to say. In that sense he is Shakespearean: his powers give power to others. Though the canon is already formidable, these new studies all add to it in different ways and suggest something new going on. For newness, of a unique kind, is perpetually immanent in Dostoevsky, always on the verge of breaking ...”

“... the diplomats were right for the wrong reasons. Neither side could match the wisdom of a man like Michael Lindsay, guide and adviser to Attlee’s group. Lindsay had lived with Mao and Zhou as a friend and comrade through the years of struggle in Yenan, but saw clearly, at an early stage, the fatal signs of growing dogmatism and arrogance in the new ...”

“... peasants.’) Sendero’s pedagogical origins made a difference too: as the American journalist Michael Smith argued in 1992, Sendero was able to spread ‘almost anywhere’ there was ‘a blackboard and benches’. In some ways, Sendero’s doctrinal inflexibility and its distance – physical and ideological – from the rest of the Peruvian left were ...”

“... and easy extrapolation. Belton is not one of them; he is as fastidious, though not so succinct, as Michael Frayn in his play Copenhagen. Heisenberg said in his memoirs that ‘science is rooted in conversations.’ He seemed to open the door, in the friendliest fashion, for the novelist and the playwright. Schrödinger’s formulation was darker: ‘Science is ...”

“... postmodernist concern with language and form continued to highlight the still wider powers, in their age, of commercial, political, or other media interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the ...”

“... because they were given better rations), their preferences hardly mattered, and the occupying powers could settle the problem as they liked. In the Soviet zone that meant swift repatriation, in the West often resettlement, at least of the young, strong, ideologically attuned and easily assimilable. In 1951, the Federal Republic agreed to assume ...”

“... Milton Keynes is a direct descendant of Bloomsbury seems about as plausible as trying to show that Michael Foot speaks with the authentic voice of the Levellers. More fundamentally, the central argument of this book, that London’s homely architecture is the product and expression of Londoners’ homely virtues, is chronologically unsound. Most of the ...”

“... Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at the mountain and drink glasses of Powers. Now and then there’s a silence, pause, a moment of contemplation, a gap. It’s like being inside a double bowl – the glass dome, then the city ringed by hills. A line of Lowell’s – ‘this sweet volcanic cone’ – comes to mind, except it’s ...”

“... might well have led to pressure, not least from conservative Tories, to consolidate local powers. So the Government improvised. Block grants, expenditure targets, penalties, more severe penalties, rate-capping and ‘incentives’ were introduced to get spending down. None of these had much effect. A Green Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest ...”

“... though without dwelling on it, in opposing the iterative nature of language, with its illusory powers of arrest over the temporal process, to the real unrepeatability of passing time. Sadly, Bergson’s sparingness in the matter of language perished with him. He died in 1941, just when Jean-Paul Sartre, homo loquax made flesh, was launching unscrupulously ...”

“... self-consciously intellectual’ politicians such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and Michael Foot. Here is unmasked the latent snobbery of the anti-suburbans. The great merit of the garden suburb is that it brought order, grace and amenity to something that would have happened anyway. True enough, the centres of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden ...”