“... Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a writer’s bits and pieces into an archive. The typescript used in the printing of Nineteen Eighty-Four is in the Orwell Archive at University College London. There are also preliminary drafts of the novel – pages of handwritten and typewritten material, with corrections and additions – which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... administrative hierarchy. I myself needed no persuading of the wrong-headedness of the campaign by John Hoskyns (who is not mentioned in the lecture) for politicisation of Civil Service appointments, and I think that others will also find the arguments convincing. The lecture describes the close working relationship that can exist between a minister and a ...”

“... of leading a crusade. I have led one.’ The classic mode of acceptance, however, was John F. Kennedy’s in 1960: ‘With a deep sense of duty and high resolve, I accept your nomination. I accept it with a full and grateful heart – without reservation – and with only one obligation – the obligation to devote every effort of body, mind and ...”

“... advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public ...”

“... Is ours a bad age for thinking? To take up the last question first, it is worth noting that John Stuart Mill thought of his own age, which we now view with reverence, as not a strong age for thought. He blamed this largely on the educational methods of his day, which featured cramming and rote learning, and produced what Mill called ‘mere knowledge ...”

“... ascribing a multitude of experiences to one figure has been vigorously maintained, especially by John Berryman in Dream Songs, though in that case the necessary distinction between ‘Henry’ and Berryman didn’t survive the strain he put on it. In the end, Berryman overwhelmed his creation by falling upon him. Harsent has given his puppet a busy life: he ...”

“... Priapeville, Bordelopolis, Voluptopolis. There is possibly a touch more wit in the wry name that John Camden Hotten, who laboured in the dubious sector of the London book trade, gave to a series of reprints he published in the 1870s: the ‘Library Illustrative of Social Progress’. Another example of Victorian erotica, The Pearl, A Journal of Facetiae ...”

“... do is watch it And hope that this time our side doesn’t botch it. The Secretary of Defence, John Nott, Has made a whopping balls-up in the House. The Foreign Secretary’s on the spot, Loudly accused of being short of nous. The top gun-boat exponent of the lot, A prancing lion where once crouched a mouse, Is Michael Foot, who now speaks for the nation ...”

“... out as a rather small man, try to enlarge him by Latinising his going. But an epitaph made by Pope John III in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Rome hasn’t much bearing upon a man who would have hated to receive it. The Latin reminds me that there is far too much of it in this book. McDowell and Webb write so well in English that it is supererogatory to ...”

“... First Crusade was that the various Islamic powers never realised what was actually happening; and John Gillingham, the Lion-Heart’s biographer, could scarcely complain of his discussion of the Acre massacre (on which Mr Finucane is more lurid). If Newby’s Saladin somehow fails to inspire, this is partly because of his low-key, if agreeable style, but ...”

“... the Thatchers. When he suddenly decided, at the end of his astonishing 1985 season, to march from John O’Groats to Land’s End to raise money for leukaemia research, there was, as Frank Keating persuasively proves, not an ounce of self-publicism in it. He knew his stunt could raise money, so he performed it – at great physical cost. Everyone quoted in ...”

“... been a long debate in the Party about its intellectual roots. Did it owe more to R.H. Tawney or to John Rawls? In a free society, what relative importance should be attached to the values of liberty and equality? How could Social Democrats distinguish themselves from Croslandite democratic socialists if the Labour Party’s temporary recovery was ...”

“... as ‘the representative of the goddess of health in the more or less indecent exhibition of John Graham ... a quack-doctor’, but Ms Fraser dismisses this association with a Georgian peep-show on chronological grounds, and plausibly suggests that the legend was derived retrospectively from a Rowlandson cartoon that belongs to the years of her ...”

“... the fortifications, by which they mean their performance under fire. Inspired by the work of Sir John Hale in particular, they have gone to the archives of Siena and Florence and turned themselves into military historians, capable of discussing with precision and plausibility such technical matters as the rate of fire of artillery, and of providing a ...”