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“... and of no party at all. Many of the contributors still are these things, though some, like Michael Young, have returned to the Labour Party de jure and others de facto. It was a measure both of the successes of the Conservative Party in the Eighties and the apparent decay of the social-democratic and Marxist alternatives that such a popular front was ...”

“... to prevent the formation of such obviously communal events is a source of moral confusion for many young people. The language of epic struggle – War on Drugs v. Freedom to Party – is deployed on both sides of the Ecstasy divide. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, a period of huge, illegal outdoor raves, there was a sense that a battle was being waged ...”

“... entirely consistent with the New Liberalism of the years when Tawney, Beveridge and Attlee were young. The underlying conviction was that the small cost in individual liberty was outweighed by the larger gain in collective equality – a gain without which, indeed, individual liberty was virtually meaningless to those of the population to whom the ...”

“... done no work on their offending behaviour and cannot be released. For such prisoners, many of them young and disturbed, an unlit tunnel of unknown length lies ahead. The appellate role is complex in such a situation: it has to respect what legislation prescribes, but as long as Parliament leaves judges some discretion the courts can seek to mitigate law with ...”

“... of ridding sex of ‘any emotional connotation’ has at last been accomplished by today’s young women: ‘They had finally succeeded in tearing from their hearts one of the oldest human feelings, and now it was done … at no moments in their lives would they ever know love.’ But Houellebecq too often writes as if personality and emotion could be ...”

“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

“... Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show. I took this to mean the PM had given the order to sink the Belgrano. But Mr Pym was speaking in a different context. Paul Daniels, who was also a ...”

“... the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their own voices by Gordon Brown. No one has been more aware of the ...”

“... vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world, 75 feet wide and 110 feet high’ (according to Gavin Young’s book, Iraq: Land of Two Rivers). Beneath this arch, the Roman Emperor Caracalla, himself part-Syrian, once invited the Parthian princes to a feast and then killed them all; another ugly tale about Caracalla is that he dug up, not far ...”

“... for the ‘Things ain’t what they used to be’ section): ‘That an increasing number of young men from Eton and the other major public schools should have done things like photography, interior decoration, or art-dealing in preference to the traditional service careers was to a certain extent the result of Britain’s withdrawal from India and other ...”

“... Lincoln standing in the church amid the weeping and howling children. They claimed that a young man who had died a decade earlier had appeared to them and accused Lincoln of killing him. The children chanted ‘God is good’ as they surrounded the old man, who was being held fast by a youth called Martin. ‘We don’t want to kill you,’ Martin ...”

“... them, look after the elderly, remember you are nothing, and keep the cheapskates at bay.When I was young, I had a thing for the after-places, which didn’t have patrons, or, heaven forfend, members, but habitués. There were a few Chinese restaurants in Gerrard Street which had shebeens in the back. You had to drink and not fight – these were the only rules ...”

“... can’t make out with him because if she did he might turn evil; a reader would have to be very young and/or very ignorant not to feel she had seen this sort of thing before. Didn’t something very much like it form the Big Bad – the major villain-arc – in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 2? (Or am I merely showing my age by remembering a TV programme ...”

“... anaesthesia, a very rare psychological condition.’ This ‘doctor’ was presumably one of the young editors. The editorial team of Out of Bounds had a sharp eye for publicity, blazoning across the masthead ‘Banned in Uppingham … Banned in Cheltenham’. But it was an expensive production at a shilling an issue, and short-lived. It would never have ...”

“... of Broch’s or Eliot’s Virgil and, say, a comparison between major English translations from Gavin Douglas and Dryden to today? Dare one even mention how stringently apposite an insight might be won from a contrastive look at the musical apprehension of the Aeneid in Berlioz’s Troyens and in Barraqué’s massive, if incomplete settings of ...”