“... that is required is a large and colourful lie,’ Zak tells the Mosleyites – whereupon Amos, who may or may not have had a Jewish grandfather, chips in with ‘Why not pick on the Jews?’ But it is Zak, not Amos, who joins the New Party and adopts the role of a Jewish anti-semite. I was Mosley’s double, a star turn ...”

“... where problems of crowding, poverty and racial tension are endemic, riots do not start. New York may not have found the preventive cure for rioting, but it was clear in those tumultuous long hot summers of the late Sixties that the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with ...”

“... describes, claims a self-sufficiency and recognises no obligation to be more than itself. Now this may seem to be an easy task, to describe a series of landscapes but to withhold any explanation beyond the grasp of a child, and at the simplest level we examine this testimony as we examine that of the children and other naïfs who inform Wordsworth’s Lyrical ...”

“... of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning calls.’ Eight: Finnegans Wake may have something to do with the execution, on 8 December 1922 – of Rory O’Connor, one of the Irregulars. Nine: ‘Dublin remains obsessed with the writers it doesn’t read.’ I have listed these items mainly to indicate that anything you care to say about ...”

“... and scourging, prayers and fasting, and, worse than these, the forcible confession of sins that may not even have been contemplated, let alone committed: over all is the fear of the eternal flames, the begging to die and to be taken into God’s bliss. The power of this terrible creed, soon to be subsumed into Wesleyanism proper, is sustained by the crazed ...”

“... heritage, class identity or historical destiny in the creation of a necessary myth. The myth may be necessary in order to fortify the ambitions of the restless, to gratify the complacency of the satisfied or to console the amour-propre of the dispossessed. The functions of the past, in this sense, are governed by the needs of the present. Much general ...”

“... that marked the end of Brezhnev’s rule: from this, even so independent a mind as Medvedev’s may not have been entirely immune. With a new leader in the Kremlin and political change in the air, he has begun, in the last few months, to speak out again, even though the present climate for dissent could hardly be less congenial. The fact that Medvedev is ...”

“... was also a gross overestimation of the Luftwaffe’s bombing capacity which R.V. Jones suggests may have been due to an RAF officer’s joke that was taken seriously. Basil Collier, author of The Defence of the United Kingdom (1957) in the Official History series, points out that privileged historians like himself were aware of the Allied access to Ultra in ...”

“... it was the craze of the century). Science and technology, too, have had to be set aside. This may be thought to be more questionable, for though the immediate impact of technological change was small (yet Norman cahiers of 1789 grumbled bitterly about English textile machinery), those hints of the future which are discernible surely require comment. Why ...”

“... very much. Fantasies as well as facts can make people ill. What this book shows is that whatever may (or may not) be our genetic pre-dispositions, the particular set of constraints (legal and moral) which surround the concepts of ‘incest’, ‘rape’, ‘paedophilia’, ‘homosexuality’ in contemporary American ...”

“... frightful weather.’ Polly is charmed. The next minute, matters are arranged so that she may experience one of the sudden infatuations Jane Gardam is so good at depicting, along with the equally sudden retraction which is sure to follow. An earlier novel – A Long Way from Verona (1971) – contained a character who looked like Rupert Brooke: this ...”

“... power are incompatible.’ He retorts that ‘a literary style cultivated like a hothouse plant may show a certain artificial purity, but it won’t be really pure.’ The polarising of intellect and power is demonstrable rubbish: Grass quotes, in several of these speeches, examples of writers who have wielded power – usually with noxious results. Even ...”

“... the left critics that the NUM was putting flesh on bones set in place by them. If the mineworkers may be described as ‘lions led by donkeys’ (in Eric Hammond’s typically emollient phrase to the Labour Party Conference in October), then the donkeys could as well retort that they at least led, and that those carping from a position well behind them were ...”

“... and promise myself work or love or letters, or fall back on the comfortable reflection that I may soon be dead myself.’ A reluctant but conscientious officer, he went off quite routinely, thanks to a piece of shrapnel in the mouth. In the sealed world of The Children of the Souls the lower orders are neither seen nor heard. Voices from the Spanish Civil ...”

“... work on the 18th century has shown, he writes well. His Thoughts on the Present Discontents may not quite match Burke’s: but they are cleverly marshalled. His many insights are highly informative. His few in comprehensions could hardly be more revealing. Mr Carswell names the Assessors who sat with the Robbins Committee and acted as liaison officers ...”