“... Scots, the Royal Scots Fusiliers and Sempill’s Borderers, not to mention the eight companies of Campbell Highlanders. It was a British army. But, in exact reversal of what he himself says, in Lucas’s account, when things go wrong it is the ‘English’ who are to blame. This naturally affects his definition of ‘Englishness’. It becomes a quality ...”

“... is the source of Joyce’s title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was ...”

“... No two pictures​ of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much flashbulb ...”

“... intimate self-exposure, with a terrifying appendix called ‘Reining in the Arctic’. Alastair Campbell blurbs it as ‘a proper piece of journalism’ – which says it all, since the book flatters security wonks without disturbing anyone’s received wisdom. It is meant to be a warning against the ambitions of Russia and China, trumpeting liberal ...”

“... lot. So far we have had diaries from two of its central figures, David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell, and from a spin-doctor hanger-on (Lance Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them ...”

“... acquisitive and materialistic? More than forty years ago, in Prosperity and Parenthood (1954), J.A. Banks performed a classic analysis of middle-class consumption in the central decades of Victoria’s reign and concluded that such families were purchasing more of everything. He saw this acquisitiveness as a result not of changed attitudes, but of changed ...”

“... letter for Sol. ‘Exposure’ has several meanings, and ‘nethermore’ glances, I think, at J.M. Barrie’s Neverland, to give Carroll a little company. Just how maudlin one could be about Magdalen we shall never know. Always welcoming to new echoes and connections, Joyce turns Carroll into a minor avatar of his dodgy hero, Humphrey Chimpden ...”

“... hated the clichés and party-line posturing, and dismissed the pamphlet as ‘bloody rot’. Roy Campbell jeered at the Republicans: ‘The sodomites are on your side;/The cowards and the cranks.’ Ezra Pound said the enemy wasn’t Franco, but big-time international finance: ‘You are all had. Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed ...”

“... the mob’s blogs, to such emperors of the moralistic gutter as Murdoch, Dacre, his loyal valet Stephen Glover and the blowsy fishwife Piers Morgan, with their prying snout for dirty laundry and ear for intercepts they know nothing about. As Vanbrugh had it, ‘they have too much zeal to have any charity; they make debauches in piety as sinners do in ...”

“... the parties had no prior relationship of trust which could have been breached, Lord Justice Stephen Sedley considered that unimportant; the time had come, he said, to recognise that people enjoyed privacy as a self-standing right ‘drawn from the fundamental value of personal autonomy’. A slew of celebrities proceeded to take advantage of this ...”

“... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...”

“... tend to underplay have to be taken into account. Asquith’s biographers, Roy Jenkins and Stephen Koss, both casually assert that Asquith ‘won’ three general elections. In our modern sense, he never won one. Campbell-Bannerman was the party leader at the Liberal landslide of 1906, and Asquith’s two elections ...”

“... was surely there to be read, but they would not allow it to be heard. The Commission had announced Stephen Foster when they were actually playing Wagner. Surely, critics who had followed the true score should have pointed that out?A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’ – the press, the academics, the think-tankers ...”

“... of the USA, credit-rich geeks, surfers with trembling fingers. The ones who are currently sampling Stephen King. When the investment pays off, the nouveau plutocrats buy into old-fashioned bricks and mortar. Property prices soar. Clerkenwell booms from the Euro-rinsed Smithfield meat market, through Cloth Fair, back to Hoxton and Shoreditch. The psychic ...”

“... My Irish friend recommended that people get to know the enemy by reading a biography of Alastair Campbell. The meeting lasted longer than two hours. Throughout, in what people said, there was a frequent, unthinking slippage between ‘members’ and the ‘public’. In our small discussion group it was never quite clear whom we were meant to be persuading ...”