“... away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High ...”

“... servant or manager; Helen Broderick as the friend who has seen it all before, several times; Edward Everett Horton as the dopey impresario whose every take is a double-take. Horton is missing from Swing Time, soon to be released in a newly restored version by the Criterion Collection, but everyone and everything else is there. Still, I now see all kinds ...”

“... nasty, self-righteous little boys brought a prisoner to him. ‘Here, Arfur. ’E swore!’ they said virtuously. Arfur responded: ‘Ow, pour some water dahn the bugger’s arm.’ That took the wind out of the little prigs’ sails. Even swear-words can be cleanly used. I am emulating Baden-Powell’s anecdotal mode of moral instruction. He followed ...”

“... and Newnham students are still expected to cheer the achievement of Philippa Fawcett, who is said to have stunned the Cambridge establishment in 1890 by coming top of Part One of the Mathematical Tripos (as a woman she could not be given the usual title of Senior Wrangler; so, in an awkward compromise, she was declared to have come ‘above the Senior ...”

“... book could be expected to have the guile to become prime minister. What, then, is there left for Edward Pearce to say? His biography is a handsome and informative study, benefiting from the co-operation of its subject, notably by means of unique access to the diary which Healey kept from the age of 16. Evidently a spare and terse record, this has provided ...”

“... best merely grist to the mill of consciousness: a true modern genius displayed itself, Coleridge said (he coined the phrase ‘mental space’), as ‘a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object’. Coleridge was much preoccupied by such thoughts: Carlyle remembered him sitting in his Highgate den, snuffling interminably ...”

“... can’t say “I”. They aren’t in fact, and so they’re supermen. Pierpont Morgan has never said “I” in his life.’ Strouse would agree. ‘He was, as Henry Adams said of Theodore Roosevelt, “pure act”.’ But Schlegel goes on to say, ‘if you could pierce through him, you’d find panic and emptiness in the ...”

“... what appears to have been carried forward has been unobtrusively revised or augmented. Harvey is said to have been rather weak on ‘movements’, and the new editor has tried to remedy this defect, even claiming to have been rather daring and contentious in doing so. I haven’t found much evidence of such coat-trailing. The entry on structuralism seems ...”

“... had to half-crawl across the garage to get in. How I managed to drive the 12 kilometres to Port Edward remains a mystery – I was lurching all over the road. Arriving at the offices of Dr Chetty, whose board advertises him as a dokotela (Zulu for ‘doctor’) trained in Mysore, I found several other patients ahead of me but stumbled over to the ...”

“... impossible to grasp:‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,      That I kept my word,’ he said.Never the least stir made the listeners,      Though every word he spakeFell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house      From the one man left awakeYet ‘The Listeners’ is also full of properties and details that register as vivid or ...”

“... she had’nt [sic] been well basted by it.’ In personal matters Alix was intolerant: Klein, she said, ‘dances like an elephant’ – a severe handicap when the major preoccupation in Twenties Berlin was party-going. Alix clearly found vulgar Klein’s penchant for dressing up for these parties ‘as a kind of Cleopatra – terrifically décolletée ...”

“... and make room for the future? Blueprint for a Green Economy, by David Pearce, Anil Markandya and Edward Barbier, is a report drawn up by the London Environment Centre for the UK Department of the Environment. It is a state-of-the-art review of ‘Sustainable Development, Resource Accounting and Project Development’. Starting with the idea of sustainable ...”

“... to defend the record of the Schools Council. It was set up in 1964, a gentler time, by Sir Edward Boyle, and its brief was then, and has, in a variety of manifestations, remained, the combining of examination reform with curriculum development. These were areas traditionally kept apart, for the soundest political reasons and with dire consequences for ...”

“... reminding us that the interest of a history lies not only in what it says but in when it was said. 1968 was the year in which it seemed necessary to warn Edward Heath against wandering too eagerly in the direction of Selsdon Park. Here is Blake on tariff reform: It has seldom paid for the Conservative Party to come ...”

“... ignoring the Queen.’ Now the process of reappraisal has been taken a good deal further by Edward Gregg, a graduate originally of the University of Lawrence, Kansas, to whose scholars, and scholarly resources in the shape of the Spencer Research Library, students of English history in the 18th century are already greatly indebted. Dr Gregg sees the ...”