“... obscured the instruction of the text. There are a number of ways of approaching this, but the best is probably to begin with its dedication. The book is devoted to the memory of Michael Oakeshott – whose thought, Mount tells us, has left its traces, ‘no doubt sadly smudged’, on many of its pages. At first glance, the affinity between author and ...”

“... Gandhi called the offer a ‘postdated cheque drawn on a crashing bank’ – but Orwell did his best to soften the truth. In his broadcast news commentary, he conceded the failure but added that reports from across the world showed that only supporters of fascism were pleased by it. According to the BBC broadcast, the claim made by Axis broadcasters that ...”

“... conclusion that it would be dangerously irresponsible not to attempt to slow global warming. How best to do this has been a debate largely dominated so far by economists, such as Nicholas Stern, the author of last year’s Treasury study. Economists tend to be sceptical about both voluntary restraint and the capacity of ...”

“... to the trade unions, and her famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ But as Nicholas Timmins has pointed out in The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (1995), by the end of her period of office a prime minister whose instincts were ‘to unscramble the NHS and to increase charges, to roll back social security and social ...”

“... Emily Hale, the old flame with whom Eliot visited Burnt Norton, Andrew Eliot, Sir Thomas Elyot, or Nicholas Ferrar who in 1626 established the religious community at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire; but these names are suppressed within the poems, ghosting them. The insistent names are place names. The people, like the dancers of ‘East Coker’, have been ...”

“... to the exalted nature of his literary ambitions. Regrettably, not even in what seem to me the best of his novels – The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Seize the Day (1956) and Herzog (1964) – is there any achieved realisation of ‘the idea of greatness’ as a condition of mind. And in much of the work thereafter, including Mr Sammler’s Planet ...”

“... grew up, Lucretia Jones’s small daughter dutifully replied (as she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually ...”

“... their way. There was an election coming within 18 months and if she lost it they might spend the best years of their political lives in opposition. Meanwhile, if Heseltine won, many of them would be out in the cold anyway. ‘The elders of the tribe, and most of its leading younger members too, wanted a quiet life and their own collective advancement. They ...”

“... insanely generous the next, passionately Catholic and, above all, convinced that he lived in the best of all possible worlds – Sarmatia Felix, the land of Golden Freedom. Bewildered readers may remember the way the Mitford sisters described their ‘Farve’, Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s books. Here was a real English Sarmatian: a ferocious backwoods ...”

“... From Gloucester Out. In other words, poets published poets, signalling their affinities the best way, through production, while continuing to strengthen transatlantic traffic, through readings, academic exchanges, hospitality. Distribution was nicely random, with many of these books and pamphlets being trusted to the postal service, as gifts to ...”

“... the First Folio (1623) and its reprints (1632, 1663-64, 1685), followed by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 ...”

“... very absoluteness of the Cold War borders left a whole series of chinks and crevices. Some of the best were in Berlin, naturally. There was a whole archipelago of tiny islets of West Berlin territory floating offshore in East Germany, connected to their mainland by barbed-wire causeways. There were also places in what had been the city centre where the Wall ...”

“... decision-making in certain circumstances that it was partly a case of government knowing what was best, but it wasn’t just that: ‘If we were to lay specifically our thought processes before you,’ he added, ‘they are not just going before you; they are laid before a worldwide range of uncomprehending or malicious commentators.’ This is the point. A ...”

“... free Poland. ‘To a large degree, Lithuania is a continuation of Poland,’ he wrote, but ‘the best plan with Poland is to ensure free development to the Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Jews, and to do away with the great advantage of one people over another.’ A federation, an association of independent nations or a single state with self-governing ...”

“... and language towards one’s fellow citizens are acceptable or right. This is statute law at its best – picking up and consolidating an incipient and fragile change of social mood, giving it legitimacy and backing it with legal redress. We have certainly not eliminated racial and sexual discrimination, but few would dispute that things would be markedly ...”