“... Party. Callaghanite Labourism, with its corporatist kow-towing to the Unions and its Tammany Hall approach to political leadership, was, if anything, even less attractive to us than Bennite neo-Marxism. But even we had not quite emancipated ourselves from our Labour Party pasts or from the Labour Party assumptions which we had absorbed at the political ...”

“... not much cleverer than opera plots as told by emojis, but it is nice to think about, for instance, John Adams’s Harmonielehre as a long flight from a relentless rhythmic unison in E minor via a Wagnerian prism to an ecstatic combination of a grid and a wild and dangerous celebration of E flat major. Four years ago I wrote a viola concerto – first performed ...”

“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... unaided by experiment or instruments, could arrive at exact knowledge. Some two centuries later, John Herschel, in his textbook, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), warned the novice that the human sense apparatus was too crude and subjective an instrument to discover anything of scientific moment. The senses, he argued, must be ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... cue’ with which the narrator is suddenly threatened ‘out of the blue’ in Foster’s pool hall, to which he returns at the end of the poem; Madoc opens and closes in some futuristic domed city called Unitel inhabited by Geckoes who decipher the rest of the poem by harnessing a retinagraph to the right eyeball of a certain South; and ‘7, Middagh ...”

“... all show and not much business. Early on, we’re often told, they were the constant butt of music-hall comedians (something to do, this, with George Robey who was apparently on Chelsea’s books once, as an amateur). There was even a popular ditty – ‘The day Chelsea went and won the Cup’ – which was taken to encapsulate the club’s special brand of ...”

“... attributes the misery he depicts to the economic philosophy that was predominant. He quotes John Law, with implicit approval, when Law referred to the ‘ranks of the great army’ of unemployed that ‘goes marching on heedless of stragglers, whose commander-in-chief is laisser-faire, upon whose banners “Grab who can” and “Let the devil take the ...”

“... an appealing picture of Fournier, not only as an energetic young romantic, haunting the Queen’s Hall to hear Wagner, and the Tate Gallery to see the Pre-Raphaelites, but as a hungry French schoolboy. He even had to ask Isabelle to send him bread from Paris. All the more credit to him that by the time he left for the rentrée he had come to love ...”

“... to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial stake in some best-selling ...”

“... and valuers, who submitted the stamp to the Royal Philatelic Society. On 30 January 1931, Thomas Hall, president of the Society, signed Certificate 14,764 of the Expert Committee, on which was written: ‘This stamp is a variety unchronicled and hitherto unknown to the Expert Committee. Having regard to the lapse of time since this stamp was issued, the ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... friendship with the poet, which grew out of the Poetry International performances at the Festival Hall and elsewhere: so that some will feel that the book is facing in the wrong direction, that it is biased towards the less rewarding half of Auden’s life. Among the best things in the earlier chapters is a dry telling of the story of his temporary devotion ...”

“... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by compulsion if ...”

“... room with its fevers and dreams. My old parents asleep, only a few yards across the hall, door open – lest I cry? Kleinzahler’s work has been praised for its ‘funky syntax’, but it is the delicacy and unobtrusiveness of the transitions achieved in these lines that seem to me crucial to many of his best effects: indeed, it is the ...”