“... and electrified Africa’. But for the time being they’re ‘a convenient image of African power on the march’. Friendlier observers see Morel’s campaign as a parable, which they interpret in line with their own preoccupations. Elephants, a French columnist notes, resemble the rights of man, ‘those noble, clumsy, gigantic, anachronistic survivals ...”

“... E.H. Carr, as well as Peter Smollett, who was indeed a Soviet agent, and who had probably advised Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm in 1944.Burgess explains at length that Orwell’s list was not a McCarthyite hit list, since the only harm that might befall those on it would be that they wouldn’t be asked to provide propaganda for the Information ...”

“... against countries that didn’t comply, but this never happened. The WHO has never had the power to compel a reluctant member nation. Its funding and staffing were small – 254 in 1949 – and its competencies both vague and potentially limitless. It had the remit to be the world’s watchman for infectious disease outbreaks, but it also had a ...”

“... he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a book on Jonathan Swift, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life. He was also emerging as a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear, founding the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin. In 1841, he was chosen by the Census Commission to find out more ...”

“... day in 1921 was his bid for freedom. Not surprisingly, Pritchett is a frequently quoted witness in Jonathan Rose’s recent book, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, in part because he was so eloquent about his sense of being educationally deprived. Like other autodidacts of his time (few of them, including Pritchett, entirely ...”

“... when next someone steps onto the stage it’s ankle-deep in water. There is no light at all as the power has immediately to be switched off and when I go into the auditorium (the first night audience now waiting in the foyer ready for the start) there are dim figures moving about the sodden stage, torches flashing in the gloom and firemen clambering up the ...”

“... is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to ...”

“... information could be stripped of the old markers of authority – authority both in the sense of power and in the sense of being reliably accurate – by which we, often without thinking, judged it. It was hard and expensive and required a lot of clever people and technology to design a newspaper page and to print it in hundreds of thousands of copies ...”

“... already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984) goes ...”

“... frustrations with the Civil Service and with the Treasury. Blair reveals that his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, overheard a phone conversation at the height of the crisis between the two Browns, during which Gordon warned Nick not to give in to Blair’s ‘presidential style’. It is a cliché of the Blair years, and not really true, that his was a ...”

“... clarifying to uncomplicate things. But this is all a bit too self-consciously feel-good – what Jonathan Meades memorably pegged as the ‘new, accessibly accessible fun-style fun arts’. Art as a kids’ workshop in which no one ever fails. Which is, you might say, lovely in practice but not the least bit interesting as ‘theory’. If everything is ...”

“... a teenager called Amy in Amis Senior’s The Green Man, who is a fan of a pop-star called Jonathan Swift.Reading twenty-odd reviews of the same book was (for me) an unusual and unnerving experience. The dominant impression created by this bizarre over-exposure was of an aggregation of nervous tics so enormous that one had to think of them as cultural ...”

“... last of the great New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review,’ the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in a memorial tribute, ‘she was the only one in that crowd who understood and appreciated film in a wholly cosmopolitan manner, as part of art and culture and thought.’ Partisan Review’s​ intellectuals and their English department ...”

“... your forehead starts to wrinkle? The only two that came unbidden to my mind are by Devo and Cat Power, who gave us wildly different takes on ‘Satisfaction’. (For the record, my own favourite Beatles covers are, in no particular order, by Caetano Veloso, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Harry Nilsson, Bobbie Gentry – and Marvin Gaye, who turns ...”

“... you could avoid reading him on a university campus, or continue reading him outside one. In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Chip Lambert, a former associate professor of literature in his thirties, decides to purge his library of Marxist cultural critics in order to raise some funds with which to indulge the yuppie tastes of his new ...”