“... When Stephen Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed by the hound’s demise not being reported in the obituary columns of next day’s Times ...”

“... When​ did the ‘modern’ era begin? For the European imagination across more than a millennium, the most significant divide was between antiquity and what followed, such that for some centuries ‘modern history’ was held to have begun with the fall of Rome. Applying a different filter, the category of the ‘Middle Ages’ indicated the post-Renaissance sense of an epoch between the ancient world and the ‘revival’ of learning, with the period from the late 15th century then becoming the first modern era ...”

“... Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One Fat Englishman, is warned that he’s about to say something he’ll be sorry for, he replies, ‘those are the only things I really enjoy saying’ – and there isn’t much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards ...”

“... Edmund Wilson has become an object of fantasy. A lot of desire is currently invested in him as the representative of a cherished role: the critic-as-generalist, the man of letters as cultural critic, or what in the last decade or more it has become common in the United States to call the ‘public intellectual’. Fantasies are, by definition, about the not-present, and all of these notions are deployed to express a sense of absence or loss, a form of keening for a vanished world ...”

“... Three hopes​ or dreams have played important parts in modern progressive politics in Britain in the decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of reason and enlightenment ...”

“... Historians have a taste for labels that capture the character or spirit of a period – The Bleak Age, The Age of Equipoise or, in a recent work on the interwar period, The Morbid Age. It will serve early 21st-century Britain right if it becomes known as ‘The Aspirational Age’. To those who can use the word ‘aspirational’ without wincing, this might seem high praise ...”

“... One of the most fascinating yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular times, just as others come to seem irrelevant or antiquated and largely disappear from public debate. In the middle of the 18th century, to describe a measure as ‘displaying the respect that is due to rank’ was a commonplace commendation; in the middle of the 19th, affirming that a proposal contributed to ‘the building of character’ would have been part of the mood music of public discourse; in the middle of the 20th, ‘a decent standard of life’ was the goal of all parties and almost all policies ...”

“... A dictionary is, first and foremost, a practical resource; its usability when subjected to a variety of everyday scholarly demands must be the chief test of its worth. But a work on the scale of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is bound also to be seen as much more than a reference tool: as, by turns, a statement of national identity, an occasion for communal pride, a showcase for contemporary historical scholarship, a piece of swagger publishing, and, less directly, a stay against oblivion, a giant memorial slab designed to stir thoughts on fame and obscurity, on mortality and immortality ...”

“... Once​ upon a time, the distribution of power and privilege was determined by birth. Now, it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate. We can argue over the extent to which merit is, in fact, now the chief determinant of reward, but there is remarkably wide agreement that it should be, and that the operation of this principle is part of what defines a properly modern, even progressive, society ...”

“... We see a higher education sector which meets the needs of the economy in terms of trained people, research and technology transfer. At the same time it needs to enable all suitably qualified individuals to develop their potential both intellectually and personally, and to provide the necessary storehouse of expertise in science and technology, and the arts and humanities which defines our civilisation and culture ...”

“... It’s time for the criticism to stop. Whatever you think about the changes to higher education that have been made in recent years, in particular the decision in the autumn of 2010 largely to replace public funding of teaching with student fees, this is now the system we’ve got. Carping about the principle or sniping at the process is simply unhelpful: it antagonises ministers and officials, thereby jeopardising future negotiations, and it wins little sympathy from the media and wider public ...”

“... Stefan Collini writes: ‘Yes, I’d like that very much. That really would be something to look forward to.’ Frank was already weakened and wasted by throat cancer, but my suggestion that we go to watch some cricket at Fenner’s did seem genuinely to appeal to him. There wasn’t much to look forward to by this point ...”

“... a time – a very considerable sum. These are among the many striking items of information in Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds, whose title appears to accept the myth that the book disputes: that there are no British intellectuals – intellectuals are always elsewhere – or that those who think of themselves as intellectuals are really empty-headed ...”

“... focus the contingent character of the subject we call English. The very name of the discipline, as Stefan Collini argues, is slippery with ambiguity, ‘an adjective masquerading as a noun’. What is the missing noun to which English refers: literature, language or both? If both, does English belong with the study of other modern languages and ...”

“... in America and by Raymond Williams’s Arnoldian meditations in Culture and Society in Britain, Stefan Collini produced his impressive Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait in 1994. And there have been two cap-à-pie biographies: Park Honan’s in 1981 (with its provocative identification of ‘Marguerite’) and Nicholas Murray’s two years ago (with ...”