“... crammed onto the walls (20 assorted 17th-century portraits are visible in this shot alone), and no trace of an information panel beyond the tiny labels perched under each picture. The second shows the same room after the Strong treatment. There are only six paintings to be seen now; the others have given way to a large slogan blazoning CIVIL WAR, a vast ...”

“... then warned Chamberlain against the danger of a possible Nazi-Soviet pact, something almost no one else foresaw); he was also a man of courage and conscience, with a range of intellectual gifts and a degree of cultivation unmatched by any other 20th-century premier. He won the Military Cross in 1916 for risking his life by carrying his wounded ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”

“... as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that their dictionary should be ‘no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout’, an ambition that meant there could be no relying on Johnson, or cribbing the work of the American lexicographer Noah Webster, their main rival in the world of ...”

“... Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the principles on which he made his choices. All letters to Virginia Woolf are included, which was no doubt to be expected, though they are the only ones in the book that aren’t really worth reading, for they are mostly love letters, and the love letters of this stern and unillusioned figure are as likely as anybody else’s to decline immediately after the ...”

“... as a result of the worldwide protest that ‘was fired by Bruemmer’s images of the cute pups’. No doubt the concept of cuteness as a criterion for recruiting people to the minority who believe that other creatures have a right to survival on this planet is nauseous to the committed, but if you are involved in green propaganda you have to be flexible and ...”

“... faiths is forcibly intruding itself on the religious practices of another. In the mosque’s main hall of worship stand the tombs of Abraham, Jacob and Rebecca, sacred to Jews and Muslims. Before 1967 a small rabbinical school, located at the back of the mosque, had been unused for generations: after 1967 the Israelis reopened it, built a library there, and ...”

“... but also possesses the improvisatory variety and boldness of birdsong. He was probably no more licentious in his English than the perpetually rule-breaking Dickens, even if not up to Dickens’s cool overall command of long episodes of linguistic disruption. Gash calls this passage from Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour a piece of ‘straight visual ...”

“... her retirement in ‘a house with many shutters, Venetian blinds and lace curtains so that no one will ever see me and everyone will know my time is done.’ To be a great tart you have to invent yourself, just as Rothschild invented the Baron Philippe, and if you have sufficient aplomb, other people will accept your creation. Milady Vine goes up like ...”

“... Castle of Otranto is more widely read than the Collected Speeches. Why? Could it be ... No, we won’t go that far. The very suggestion would automatically be labelled slander by the Soviet press. Anyway, it is to the Western reader that this diary is addressed: the author’s forehead is far too tender to try to break through the Iron Curtain. Some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”