“... political and cultural discourse, which made it imperative for such apostles of public opinion as Andrew Marr to treat Ferguson with reverence. But his apotheosis came in the United States, where – backed by the prestige of Oxbridge and, more important, a successful television series – he became a wise Greek counsellor to many aspiring Romans. He did not ...”

“... thus instantly plunging Japan and probably the world into depression. The London-based consultant Andrew Smithers calls his gloomy analysis ‘Japan as a Laboratory for Economic Theory’ because no major economy has ever run up such an extraordinary peacetime debt, or had so few ideas about how to ease its burden.Last year, the 171-year-old Sogo Department ...”

“... but because there is no overlap in their symbolic function. The emperor represents the sun, a young god, restless, hot-tempered and bloodthirsty; the mayor the moon, an old goddess, comfortable with herself: ‘Moctezuma was the guiding force of the kingdom and Tlilpotonqui was the source of his strength, controlling the perfect wealth and fear-producing ...”

“... in watching television, would have known why. Seated behind him was a thick-set shaven-headed young man in dark glasses, black suit and black T-shirt who, minus the shades and occasionally (and far too rarely some viewers felt) minus the T-shirt, appeared nightly on the nation’s screens in a television soap. The previous week he had stunned his audience ...”

“... led to break and run from the service by some element in his relationship with one Mrs Bathurst, a young New Zealand hotel-keeper. Vickery’s fate becomes preternaturally vivid to us, but we never directly see either of the two persons concerned, or understand fully the motivations involved. The gentle and amiable Pritchard, a ‘woman’s man, struggles to ...”

“... on the heights, Carlyle’s writing has something essentially unserious about it, as of a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few ...”

“... bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 ...”

“... and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an ...”

“... of its editorial team. Two years ago we had Bertrand Russell: The Psychobiography of a Moralist by Andrew Brink, a lecturer in English at McMaster who helped to edit Volumes I and XII of the Collected Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a ...”

“... which he cuts into quatrains: Remember, imbeciles and wits, sots and ascetics, fair and foul, young girls with little tender tits, that DEATH is written all over. He then proceeds to raise desire from its captivity. ‘And Circe ... lay with me in that dungeon for a year.’ Masturbation is the figure here, as it is in Genet, another of Villon’s ...”

“... constituted, fatal to all original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and in high blood, and one of its ‘curled darlings’; and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere? In assembling his symposium on Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence, Paul True-blood contributes to an intermediate ...”

“... into combat alongside Third World armies means you need casualty evacuation and fire support,’ Andrew Fox, a former Parachute Regiment officer, pointed out. ‘These things are expensive and logistically intensive. The Ranger Regiment does not have either of those things in sufficient numbers to “accompany” safely.’ Fox agreed that all this was an ...”

“... In the 1980s, the ANC stepped in as the next major institutional force. The comrades, by and large young, all male and according to Jimmy incredibly brave, lit out from their schools to begin a campaign of confrontation in 1986, the tenth anniversary of the Soweto massacre. P.W. Botha responded with a state of emergency. The war was now in the open. As a kind ...”

“... of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t reassured but ...”

“... head west for about 40 kilometres into the Gaeltacht: we’re to have lunch with an old friend, Andrew, in the Beehive Bar near the coast. He’s there in the car-park having a smoke. I manage to refuse his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with ...”