“... they were, who their parents were or how to cope with the practical problems of daily living. As John Locke observed, total scepticism would have been incompatible with physical survival: ‘He that, in the ordinary affairs of life, would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration, would be sure of nothing in this world, but of perishing quickly. The ...”

“... thought I’d been drinking.’ The Amis style, though, doesn’t altogether fit its new context. John Self would gorge himself on emetic burgers but he wouldn’t analyse his own motives for cholesterol abuse, as Miller does: ‘I knew the stuff I was cramming into my body was crap, but I also knew there was something seductive and pleasure-giving about it ...”

“... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...”

“... does little to resolve. The Golden Age, the Land of Cokaygne, Joachimism, the Revelation of St John, the free-market economy, socialism and Marxism, democracy, America and the Soviet Union: these and more are all dragged into a history of what he calls ‘visions of ideal otherness’ which begins with Hesiod and ends sometime about now. Its great merit ...”

“... the Health Service alone, it would win hands down. 29 May. A letter from N. at Oxford saying that John Carey thinks my ‘Kafka at Las Vegas’ too ‘ruminative and ambling’ to qualify for a university-sponsored lecture. N., though finding it ‘a good read’, tends to agree and suggests an undergraduate society might leap at the prospect. Or I could take ...”

“... representation in Spitting Image). Comparisons between his performance in office and that of Pope John Paul II have been drawn, invariably to his disadvantage; and at home he has recently suffered the indignity of having the trenchantly traditional Lord Jacobovits, the Chief Rabbi, held up to him as a model he should aspire to follow. Nearly all this ...”

“... to ‘Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and even Agatha Christie’. The imaginary kingdom of Prester John which forms the main theme of Gumilev’s study refers, not to the legend of a Christian king beyond the domains of Islam as it developed in Europe, but to the existence from time to time of Christian nomad leaders in Central Asia, rumours of whose exploits ...”

“... Hobbes’s influence on the ‘briske witts’ of Charles II’s court was of the same order, and John Aubrey reported that that, too, provoked a move to ‘have the old man burned as an heretic’. The Athenians may anyway not have meant to do more than frighten Socrates out of the city. According to Plutarch, many Athenians were ready to ostracise Aristides ...”

“... the autonomous play of language and its yield in a tissue of signs. A considerable novelist like John Fowles can take as the starting-point of A Maggot the weaving of an apparently inconsequential pattern – for a ‘maggot’ is, in one of its meanings, a dance-tune. But Fowles is here an interesting case, because he actively recalls the 18th-century ...”

“... of the humiliation of some over-mighty cabinet colleague – Geoffrey Howe, say, or Jim Prior or John Moore or Francis Pym – I could picture the scene only too well:I can do no better at this stage than describe my own punishment chamber, which I call the Lady Chapel.   This is not blasphemy on my part. It is a chapel to the Lady (the Lady I serve) in ...”

“... matters. Even when fame finally comes knocking on his door in the shape of Bernardo Bertolucci, John Malkovitch, Debra Winger, and a whole Hollywood camera crew, he remains resolutely sceptical – in the event, more or less correctly ...”

“... was to be socially as well as musically discordant; it is no accident that the primary business of John Stark, publisher of Scott Joplin’s most famous rags, was the selling of pianos. The arrival of the cheap domestic piano hastened the decline of field songs and ‘spirituals’ among former slaves, but by and large failed to establish a pious white ...”

“... Jews in public’. Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose genocidal outbursts have been meticulously recorded by John Röhl, said of Kristallnacht that it made him ashamed of being a German. These hesitations become important when we consider another category that forms part of Goldhagen’s evidence, namely opponents of the Nazi regime, even active members of the ...”

“... really ‘the pre-Christian solar symbol associated with the magic number four’. The feast of John the Baptist was always only that of the summer solstice ‘and of pagan baptism’. Christianity, Camporesi claims, was forced on the countryside by the town, through the vicious ministries of the town’s minions, the Church hierarchy. But the brave ...”

“... to the Spanish courts viewed this exotic society, in which, as late as the 15th century, King John II of Castile had a Muslim bodyguard, and where, throughout the late Middle Ages, Spanish kings employed Jews as tax collectors and even confidential advisers, is an intriguing question. For by the end of the 14th century Spain was an anomaly in its ...”