“... the political message it conveys is that to him that hath, it shall be given: not only Hintlesham Hall to live in, but John Cleese and Joanna Lumley for company, and a useful collection of cashmere sweaters to wear on the HTV series which spawned the book. We further learn that HTV’s ‘imaginative and ...”

“... Edith was with them politically. ‘She even consented to appear on the platform in the Conway Hall at a meeting to discuss the formation of a Domestic Servants’ Union, and spoke shortly and to the point – after the chairman had announced that her employers had given her the afternoon off for the occasion, at which the audience clapped.’ Edith had ...”

“... game of squash on a well-preserved but stiffening older man (‘Lancelot moved to the ticket hall like a slow loris ...’ ‘Wheeling slowly like a rusty gun turret ...’ ‘ “Muscular dyslexia, is it?” the driver asked cheerfully’). The set-piece is an opera ball, full of costumes and allusions and games (‘The Millers couldn’t make it ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... collective movements clean when they performed at the Barbican last month.* Whereas in the work of John Cage, whose music often accompanied Cunningham’s dances, randomness seemed a rediscovery of the sounds found in ‘nature’, most notably in the sounds of the quiet concert hall with which he filled 4l33ll, there was ...”

“... need to read WikiLeaks’s unexpurgated accounts of skulduggery or even the scrupulous novels of John le Carré: to see what a mission really looks like one only has to watch the Al-Bustan Rotana’s CCTV footage, released on the internet by the Dubai Government Media Office last spring. This half-hour of footage is a gift to novelists who idealise the ...”

“... to find too much going on’ there. The calm was disturbed by members of a new team assembled by John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician. Von Neumann too had spent much of the war at Los Alamos. There, he was gripped by a vision as remarkable as Charles Babbage’s a century before: perhaps one could build a machine to calculate. Von Neumann was ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... owned public places (a particularly egregious example is the area in front of London’s City Hall, which is owned by Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund). In Paris, the left traditionally marches between République and Nation. But the gilets jaunes rejected this système manifestant. They occupied roundabouts, making the case – as with their bright vests ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... Oxford 1968-9. In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional newspaper, or distributing the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink ...”

“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... cultural change in his party. An intense-looking middle-aged man on the other side of the lecture hall became agitated as she spoke. ‘Stupid cow,’ he hissed. The man had asked the first question of the evening, about the Conservative position on European integration. Letwin had replied that he was happy to discuss it but hoped not to do so all night. In ...”

“... the school and under the Forth’, their fathers mined, then decorated the art rooms and the hall with pictures of swarming prehistoric life. A mother came to complain that her son had ‘done no work’ for a fortnight, he had been ‘taking encyclopedias home and reading them to all hours’ instead of doing ‘the kind of work that will help him to be ...”