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“... often alliterative exclamations – ‘Jumping jackrabbits!’ – talking insects, magic potions. Lewis Carroll is a powerful but ill-digested influence. George’s Marvellous Medicine exhibits most of the author’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses. George has a frightful Grandma, a wicked old woman with ‘pale brown teeth and a small puckered up ...”

“... negative campaigning: unpopular with voters in principle, it is highly effective in practice, as Michael Dukakis discovered to his cost in 1988 when he tried to take the high ground against George Bush Sr. The problem was demonstrated most clearly during the answers to the moderator Bob Schieffer’s third question, about leadership and the ethics of the ...”

“... with each other, we should know that they were all dead. The volume of essays, edited by Gwynne Lewis and Colin Lucas in honour of Richard Cobb, deals mostly with the later years of the Revolution, between the fall of Robespierre and the advent of Bonaparte. The period has always been rather an embarrassment to historians who are looking for patterns. If ...”

“... daftness of much of what we think about the mind. Shainberg’s epigraph comes appropriately from Lewis Carroll: a certain logical vertigo is perhaps the chief effect we register. ‘Could anyone in his right mind idealise such disorder?’ Drogin asks himself at one point. The answer is no, but he is not in his right mind, and may never get back. The ...”

“... to be able to hear any voices but their own. One of those they should have been hearing was Michael Young’s. Young is the country’s most compelling sociologist. Not lower-middle-class in origin, not indeed English at all, but half-Irish and half-Australian, educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by ...”

“... land of transplanted urban dream kingdoms, a paradise for poets who do not wish to be disturbed. Michael Viney’s documentary, The Corner of the Eye, opens with a slow sweep across this landscape, a picture of distances fringed with purple and a few tawny cows nosing through the foreground, then switches to a little white cottage in the midst of it all, and ...”

“... the dock as criminal defendants Mr Crossman’s literary executors – among them his widow and Mr Michael Foot – and the editor of the Sunday Times. An order restraining publication could be issued with so much less inconvenience: by a judge alone, without a jury, and without the machinery of the criminal law. The Lord Chief Justice decided not to stop ...”

“... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...”

“... were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend Valerie Storie and then shooting her, leaving her for dead before driving off in the couple’s car. Among the guests at the wake were Jean Justice, who told me he was a (rather elderly) law ...”

“... of symbolism in Medieval literature is refreshing. Nevertheless, the book’s tone (very C.S. Lewis) does now seem rather old-fashioned and bellelettrist and one’s understanding of Chrétien de Troyes is not increased by the parallels that Vinaver draws between him and John Steinbeck; nor does the long section on Flaubert serve to throw much light on ...”

“... excellence. As an historical essayist, however, he has no rival, at any rate since the death of Lewis Namier. When I read one of Trevor-Roper’s essays tears of envy stand in my eyes. It is not only that his essays are models of English prose. Each has a clear theme which is gradually brought into shape. At the end, we feel there is at least one inevitable ...”

“... Here, as the author of this book would agree, a great deal is owed to that earlier genius, Michael Faraday, whose ideas on ‘fields’ lead the way. But Faraday was no mathematician and Maxwell put it all into mathematical form. What came out of this, in ‘Maxwell’s equations’, Tolstoy does not, in my view, fully describe. It was known that a ...”

“... a habit of compulsive washing and a tendency to read books back to front. Or Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, who, although they were raised forty miles apart from each other in Ohio, had both worked in law enforcement, were both hobbyist carpenters, drove Chevrolets, took holidays on the same beach in Florida, smoked Salems and drank Miller Lite; both had been ...”

“... at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a once-famous letter to the Times defending Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam ...”

“... more attractive. Well-known, too, is the philological background of two writers from Oxford, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (the title of whose Oxford edition in the green cover Cunningham archaises as Sir Gawayne). It might amuse the public who know these men as modern authors in their own right to infer that in their Oxford guise they doubled as curators of ...”