“... if this were a well-attested social problem. To the modern reader, the cast of females in the book may seem so multifariously ghastly as to suggest a private vendetta against the sex in general. But everything for Sainty is a history of disappointments. At Cambridge he idolises his young tutor Gerald Newby, in whom he senses a kindred spirit, an idealist ...”

“... publishing is for a second-hand book … to bring no financial benefit to the author – the book may have saved the reader from suicide, but there’s no mechanism for the reader to acknowledge the person who made this possible.’ Suicide, pro and contra, is a big theme in The Last Samurai, so this is not as melodramatic a thought as it ...”

“... feelings. Gray’s later experiments with bardic odes and self-conscious ‘fragments’ may have qualified him to be considered a proto-Romantic in some sketches of poetical history, but Wordsworth was right to think of him at ‘the head’ of an alien poetical culture. Gray loved poetic diction, as well as scholarly quotation, poetic inversions of ...”

“... The context had shifted radically, but their reflexes remained the same. This failure to adapt may have been to some extent self-serving. So long as America appeared seriously endangered, the neo-cons could continue to inflate their own importance, admiring and advertising themselves as the only Americans capable of understanding the formidable dimensions ...”

“... was reached whereby Bush made it clear that he was going to disarm Saddam by force come what may, and Blair made it clear that, come what may, he would help him. If so, then there is also a strong suspicion that Blair, like Anthony Eden in late 1956, misled Parliament and the public over the nature of the undertaking ...”

“... 1989, ‘is clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some measure, it may be dependent on such inequality.’ By the time the Berlin Wall came down that November, almost every Latin American country had returned to some form of constitutional rule. Manuel Noriega held out in Panama, but he was dispatched a month later by US troops ...”

“... our MPs merely put in for duck-houses, moat-clearance and jumbo TV sets). And as anti-Zionism may often disguise anti-Semitism, so Europhobia proves a handy disguise for wider xenophobia. But of course it wasn’t just the press. Few prime ministers in the years since Edward Heath signed us into the EEC have found it either natural or politically ...”

“... seems forced, and readers who didn’t immediately grasp the talismanic force of the sentence may not be persuaded of it even now. Dillon is anxious to transcend the genre of the cento, ‘a work made up largely of quotations, citations and glosses on the works of others’, whose supreme example is The Anatomy of Melancholy. But when an essay follows an ...”

“... isn’t reassuring, quite apart from the ‘unfortunate erotic crisis’, undergone recently, that may account for the exemplary snugness of his leather trousers. ‘“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said. He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”’ Deke criticises everything in the house – no steaks or ice cream in ...”

“... to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son. A few years ago, when I asked my father why he wasn’t going to the house in south-west France where he had for several summers spent a few weeks, his answer sounded straightforward. ‘Too far from Figeac,’ he said. Too ...”

“... Minimum of 1645-1715, both linked to global cooling. Changing ocean currents and temperatures may also have contributed. Then there is human activity. Hubert Lamb argued not only that our ancestors probably experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman ...”

“... saying that though current restrictions make mounting any TV programmes difficult, he thinks it may be possible to do a new version of the Talking Heads monologues from 1988. Nick is ringing me (needlessly) for my permission. He comes round later and we thrash out some of the details in a conversation with him standing on the other side of the street.10 ...”

“... cannot pin them down: we are always pretty much in the dark about what they signify and where they may lead. But this truth is hard to bear, and we prefer to frame our experience in narratives whose beginning and middle seem to point to a reassuring conclusion. We are inveterate ‘tellers of tales’, in short, and we like to ‘live our lives as if we were ...”

“... laid gifts on the altar, shyly prayed: ‘Gods, if it’s true that you can give anything, grant I may make love –.’ Too shy to say ‘the maid’, he said, ‘– to someone like my ivory maid!’ But Venus, there in person, knew what he intended and, to show that she approved, the altar flames shot up into the air three times. Hastening home, the ...”

“... upon industrialism, Upon milk white metal, upon furnaces all night. Having got the thing one may fill it when required, at leisure, From any river, from the common tap; Those cloud-pipes being frozen, with marine tears; And there will always be flowers to stick into it in the springtime. Lies would be more serious if one could lie about the matter in ...”