“... Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced that no papers would be released, on the grounds that events which took place in 1946 might yet endanger national security.’ The ...”

“... was on the ground floor, she had only scratches. What more did Marie-Jo want from her father? It may occur to the reader that, with all the casual sex in the household, the daughter might have thought: why not some for herself? Yet ‘society’ frowns on this, and Marie-Jo, like everyone else, would have been aware of that. If incest leaves no mark on the ...”

“... nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all would-be revolutionaries; and one suspects that those ...”

“... main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him. One of the pavilions ought entirely to be appropriated for women and children and the other ought to contain the kitchen with apartments for Men servants ...”

“... to the Book Marketing Council’s ‘Best Novels of Our Time’ hype, and many of its quirks may have to do with his displeasure at having been, shall we say, disincluded from that list of the elect. Wherever possible, he sees to it that their taste is rebuked by his. He starts off by lopping two titles from the BMC list on the grounds that neither of ...”

“... according to a fixed ‘curve’, which dictates that less than a quarter of the population may achieve useful amounts of O-level passes and less than a tenth do well enough to proceed to higher education. It seemed essential, therefore, that neither the curriculum nor assessment should be allowed to trap the majority, or their schools and ...”

“... have brought things now to a pretty pass. One just has to read what Vaizey says. The working class may once have been warm and wonderful, but council estates are now full of ‘yobbos’. New hospitals are ‘white elephants’. Public education ‘institutionalises ignorance’. Trade unionists are ‘bibulous’. There has of course been the Falklands. ‘At ...”

“... an overweening desire to impress, which is always disastrous, or simply as flat and bathetic. Some may have been damaged by removal from the contexts that gave them their only true point, but others, it seems to me, cannot even have this said for them. A paradoxical result of Stephen Brook’s having arranged fictional and real-life accounts of dreams in ...”

“... surrealist-erotic episodes; Durrell the farcical pornographer in the Henry Miller manner. Opinions may vary, but for myself a little of this goes a long way. There are reflective and speculative interludes, on the nature of art and the conduct of life. Recurrently through the series the doctrines of a certain Gnostic sect are discussed and partly expounded ...”

“... been so sumptuously entertained by such a distinguished collection of bankrupts’. The bankers may have laughed, but Sampson thinks Lever meant it. If this is the case – and it may well be – it is a very serious state of affairs. Sampson, of course, wrote his book principally to do what he is so good at: putting ...”

“... critical reading of Trollope with which, since she doesn’t mention it, I assume she may not be familiar. This conceives Trollope as the prime example of the Victorian ‘divided mind’, as it is called. Secondly, Letwin’s argument (if one accepted it) would explain the drastic slump in Trollope’s reputation immediately after his death in ...”

“... as misusing the language. Instead, they would hold that if someone believes, say, that each person may favour himself over others whether or not that will work out to everyone’s advantage in the long run, then he is in substantive moral disagreement with utilitarianism at a fundamental level. This is a disagreement not over logic or the facts, but over the ...”

“... it furnishes a sequel to the best-selling Kane and Abel. This dynastic continuation (there may be more to come, presumably) follows the career of the Abel offspring Florentyna. Prodigally gifted and privileged from birth, Florentyna signals her future destiny by naming her first teddy-bear after the ‘Presidunk’, FDR. At six she maturely discusses ...”

“... himself with Christ’. Certainly he inclined to treat Popes as vicars of Michelangelo. It may well be his own account of his mission, given narrative form by the fantasy underlying it, that Vasari recorded as a mini-myth which is in essence a de-Christianised and non-blasphemous version of the myth of the incarnation. Dr Liebert remarks that, after ...”

“... distinguishes it from the accumulation of heirlooms, trophies and religious relics, and this may be why he does not remark that objects in museums (far more than in private collections) often serve to remind us of the age, continuity and hence importance of our civilisation, enable us to imagine that we have transcended the savagery but assimilated the ...”