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“... Blair and his advisers might as well be Jordan, Fergie and Patsy Kensit flirting with Piers in the hope of getting more of the right kind or less of the wrong kind of coverage. They might as well be editors of tabloid newspapers offering perks to their mates and doom to their enemies. I had thought that the obsession with celebrity and PR was just the idleness ...”

“... in the sermon – perhaps what it had to say about libels against those in power – unsettled Charles I, who asked to see a text. The dean nervously scrutinised it for political error: ‘I have cribrated [sifted], and recribrated, and post-cribrated the Sermon,’ he declared anxiously, and his ‘recribrations’ (the neologism – which Stubbs ...”

“... is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. Charles Darwin wanted to be a doctor, but was too sensitive to human suffering. It is a worrying thought – worrying enough to raise the pulse rate – that nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job. For ...”

“... hard and not hard enough to advertise itself by means of manifesto and provocation – could not hope to avoid accusations of gimmickry. The doctrine of ostranenie or defamiliarisation put forward in the 1920s by the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky sought to pre-empt such accusations by insisting that the work of art should, by contrast with the ...”

“... more affluent West End. The ornate Fairfield offices designed by Honeyman and Keppie (the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh worked there at the time) now house a shipbuilding museum, but construction continues next door at BAE Systems, where Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. The yard has become a rallying point for protesters who claim BAE ...”

“... the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it.’ In the days that followed, he was suitably penitent, but only the degree of the uproar had surprised him. The War of the Worlds was a Halloween prank and meant to cause a stir. He would have been tied up in the courts ...”

“... since you translated this’, and Johnson replied, ‘with a sort of triumphant smile, “Sir, I hope it is.”’ It seems likely that his hardening of Lobo’s comment about the Moors had in fact a stylistic rather than a substantive character, in the sense of being a simplification which brought an essential attitude into stronger relief than in the ...”

“... in coalition with their unspeakable parents, against the unlucky fall-guy or -girl of the house: Charles (or Clarissa) Doublebind. It comes as no surprise to note that Charles/Clarissa, a naive and dithering but basically rather sweet personality, has been driven into a spiralling psychosis through this unholy conspiracy ...”

“... was Wordsworthian, this diction was evangelical.’ Where Davie tends to be good on Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley makes him nervous, for Wesley ‘is a poet of vehement feeling’. Too much feeling in hymn-poetry Davie is certainly not prepared to countenance. Poetry that expresses giving way to feeling seems to Davie un-British and unmanly. It is in some ...”

“... saying: Good evening, I would just like to say first that, as an interviewer, and as what I hope you will believe to be an unbiased member of the electorate, I’m grateful to Anthony Eden for inviting me to cross-question him on political issues. I would like, too, to feel that I am asking questions which you yourselves would like to ask in my ...”

“... incidental detail; the story itself is simple enough. It tells how Freddie Montgomery (Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a local ‘businessman’ given to ...”

“... is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking backward filled that gap. Here was the map ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door ...”

“... mean School of, Circle of, Follower of, Style of – ‘or nothing much at all’. ‘Too much to hope that “Wouwerman” might mean Wouwerman?’ Tony asks. Martin has no doubts at all about this. ‘That’s the one thing it doesn’t mean.’ And so Martin lays his plans. Help Tony sell the Giordano, offer to take the other paintings off his hands, and ...”

“... the moral chaos of the modern world has simply been described by philosophers, from what it might hope to be if this chaos had been to any substantial degree generated by their intellectual activities. If the latter were the case, the resuscitation of an unjustly and unwisely abandoned philosophical heritage would in itself be an effective form of social ...”