“... university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement tracts – volumes that were all in the grand, glass-fronted bookcase. Therein lay knowledge. Therein lay my father’s studies . . .Newspapers?Oh, the Daily Mail would be considered middle-class and therefore rather smart. No, not smart, but respectable. Respectability was the aim.Can you remember any ...”

“... and development of the great writer. He was born on a Friday, on the same day as his young hero David Copperfield, and for ever afterwards Friday became for him a day of omen ... Born in Portsmouth on Friday, February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a slim, dark-haired, pretty woman. On the night of his birth, Elizabeth Dickens, who ...”

“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... in the quadrigas by George Récepon which burst with exhilarating absurdity from the roof of the Grand Palais in 1900. This type of sculpture was made possible by welding sheets of copper over an armature – essentially the same technique that Mukhina used. The Winged Victory was revered by Madame Verdurin, along with Beethoven’s Ninth and the Night ...”

“... He generously acknowledges the help of his team of research assistants but evidently was not too grand to get his own hands dirty in retrieving dusty files and perusing the yellowing minutes of long-defunct committees. Why, it has been asked, should an intellectual of Dahrendorf’s calibre have devoted precious years to such a task? It is difficult to ...”

“... threat. With the SNP looking certain to be the main opposition party in the new Parliament, David McLetchie, the leader of the Scottish Tories, pledged to support a minority Labour administration faced with a no confidence motion, much to the consternation of Tory strategists at Westminster and Labour spin-doctors both north and south of the ...”

“... and vast sums of unvouchered funds’. The CIA, moreover, went in for news management on the grand scale. Not only were journalistic activities extensively used for cover, but the Agency soon had its man – or several of them – on almost every major US paper and journal and not a few abroad. Where such handy conduits did not exist, the Agency just ...”

“... Year of Living Dangerously.* Credit for the screen adaptation is given to Mr Koch, together with David Williamson and Peter Weir himself. Some faults in the film probably have to do with production difficulties – for instance, the fact that all the Malay characters speak Tagalog (all right for the Philippines, where the film was shot) instead of Bahasa ...”

“... an achievement of high culture – almost an inverted mandarinism. The humble style has a grand history: to match it with great subjects calls for virtuosity, which is why it cost Orwell such time and effort to learn how it was done, and also why he was keen to distinguish it from pulp prose, which he regarded as an instrument for the oppression of ...”

“... second book; I don’t know the first, The Notebook of Gismondo Cavaletti, but it won the David Higham Prize and is described in a Nina Bawden review quoted on the flap of the new one as ‘confident’. In the Dark has all the marks of a brave but not altogether confident search for something different to say. Few novels have been written about ...”

“... aware of her part in the genesis of the entertainment, allowed herself to accept tickets for the Grand Concert Dramatique donné par M. Hector Berlioz where the Fantastique (‘Episode de la vie d’un artiste’) was to be followed by the premiere of Lélio (‘Le Retourà la vie’). It was a stage box which had been reserved, so that she found herself ...”

“... relatively minor aunt sallies of whom not all readers will have heard, such as a certain Professor David Harlan. But behind these front men lurk the high-priestly figures, whom Elton hints will prove no less evanescent: Foucault, Barthes and M. Jacques Derrida, who is expected to share Sir Geoffrey’s company when honorary degrees are conferred in Cambridge ...”

“... finance the Emperor’s return to France, had established a vast clientele of kings, princes and grand-dukes, stretching across Europe and beyond. Worth dressed the Princess von Metternich, Poole the Prince, and so on. Both soon acquired a new clientele in the American plutocracy. Parisian opinion noted that English tailoring had superseded French as early ...”

“... building and enough fine spices (especially cinnamon) to kill a horse. But when she refrains from Grand Statements, Stainer can be very good. ‘The Dice Players’, for example, is a beautifully understated poem. She has a fine ear which can evoke ‘the phrasing of spray/against sandstone’ and an eye which can see ‘floes gliding by,/chesspieces in ...”

“... from adult cells, the conclusion that adult mammals could not be cloned, a journalistic hoax (David Rorvik’s announcement that he had helped a wealthy eccentric clone himself), a brilliant experimentalist (Karl Illmensee) accused of faking results, and, finally, a small band of mavericks working outside the prestigious centres of biotechnology in the ...”