“... up out of the blue to hog the television show you were already feeling nervous about. There is no sense of comeuppance on these occasions, only a view of scuttled dignity, and life getting out of hand. What is enjoyable about the tightrope is not the feat of someone’s walking it or the threat that they might fall, but the possibility of a comic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knees wouldn’t bend very much. While my classmates sank deeply, I merely bobbed a bit, dropping no more than a couple of inches. And without a proper plié your centre was all over the place, your leaps had no lift and when you did get off the ground, you landed heavily. That wasn’t, however, as much of a problem as it ...”

“... two opposing drives: the desire to be taken seriously and the desire to be popular, and so it is no surprise that one has served as a vehicle for the other since the American 19th century. English-language detective fiction began with Poe’s pulpy stories of Auguste Dupin, and was definitively sanctified 50 years later by Chesterton, who assimilated 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 ...”

“... for different causes amounts to factionalism and therefore undermines the republic. There is no mention of freedom of assembly in the constitution of the Fifth Republic either. As for the UK, ‘it can hardly be said that our constitution knows of such a thing as any specific right of public meetings,’ the British jurist A.V. Dicey wrote in 1885. The ...”

“... Dundee. Where the Observer’s wider and obviously more up-to-date perspective came from I had no idea; the kind of smart remark that said it was a paper ‘written by Central European Jews for Central African blacks’ would have flown straight over my head. I didn’t know that it had championed the decolonisation of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... narrow chambers, none with natural light and few with more than the faintest fresco, I feel it’s no more inspiring than a tour round a 19th-century municipal gasworks, which it undoubtedly resembles. Most of the party wear headphones and follow the cassette guide and so become dull and bovine in their movements with sudden irrational darts and turns dictated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... accompanying last year’s local elections was not a success. Accusing the Tories of having no policies didn’t work either. ‘Tony Blair says it’s all style and no substance,’ Cameron told the Conservative party conference last year. ‘In fact he wrote me a letter about it. Dear Kettle, You’re black. Signed ...”

“... all civil society’, ‘a fury let loose from Hell upon us to disturb these kingdoms’. That is no longer an issue (though I recently heard a red-faced Englishman in a Cumbrian pub arguing that nuclear power-stations ‘should all be put in the Hebrides where there’s nobody to blow up’). But Scottish nationalism, and perhaps even nationhood is now ...”

“... comparative perspective. The winds of change required a frontierless open space, in course design no less than in campus architecture. In the new universities, then the pace-setters for educational innovation, history was absorbed in larger frameworks and organised not in departments but in interdisciplinary schools – ‘Comparative Government’ at the ...”

“... of participants, the level of inspiration and accomplishment is remarkably uniform. One artist, no better and no worse than the rest, supplied a colour film of a naked man scrabbling about in a forest. Another showed a videotape of himself bowing solemnly to the camera. A third tacked up a scrap of paper that ...”