“... a blind eye on forbidden infidel activities, providing no Saudis are ‘corrupted’. Europeans may brew their home-made hooch, and discreetly indulge in extra-marital sex, so long as they remain in their hotel rooms or compounds, though technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering ...”

“... It may be too soon to be passing judgment on the Cameron government. But it does sometimes look as if we are back with the impatient legislation of the Blair era, along with the facile soundbites, the eye-catching initiatives, the whitewashed sleaze, the fawning towards the tabloids (in Blairspeak, ‘managing the relationship’), and the unwillingness or inability to think through the implications of under-researched policy decisions – tendencies which in the end came to be deplored by many of Blair’s one-time supporters as well as his opponents ...”

“... people today, having gone through the purgative fires of Thatcherism, all that community spirit may seem too good – or too illogical – to be true, a myth. Historians have been quick to point out exceptions: instances of defeatism, disloyalty and people taking advantage of wartime conditions to loot, steal, cheat and kill undetected. ITV’s Foyle’s ...”

“... to direct rule from Westminster, and that Bradley start paying out the £1 billion that Theresa May was forced to pledge last year in exchange for the DUP’s help in propping up her minority government. The DUP’s deputy leader and leader at Westminster, Nigel Dodds, pointed out that this agreement was not contingent on the restoration of the executive at ...”

“... seem nonplussed by the need for all this self-promotion, distrusting the visitors their sites may attract. ‘If you are a lazy and/or unimaginative journalist,’ A.L. Kennedy chaffs on her website, ‘you may consider using the material contained in these pages to pad out your ...”

“... economical, even subtle. Sniggerers will have a field day with Port Mungo. Some of its absurdities may be deliberate (the narrator is clearly and rather programmatically undermined throughout the book). But not many, I think. For a start, the narrator is supposed to be a woman, but she doesn’t sound like one. She sounds like a hammy male actor in late middle ...”

“... the recrudescence of political brutality was only a matter of time, lampoons or no lampoons. This may be called the siphon theory of political possibility. It is very melancholy, and superbly conveyed by Garcia Marquez. We see tyranny – in the brief span of 17 days – finding its level in the Town through a series of partly careless, partly amiable, partly ...”

“... well aware that his attitudes on this question were far from universally shared: indeed, that they may well have inverted those which most of his contemporaries conventionally expressed. ‘I cannot abide,’ he wrote, ‘that passion for caressing newborn children, which have neither mental activities nor recognisable bodily shape by which to make them ...”

“... social mobility always remains a strong possibility for everyone, however illusory the idea may often be in practice. Later, 19th-century adventure novels set in the past, such as Kingsley’s Westward Ho! or Hereward the Wake, helped to foster the imperial ideal by suggesting that it was natural for Britains to seek an outlet overseas for all the manly ...”

“... Cary, Viscount Falkland, who regarded him as one ‘who thought himself no Martyr, yet one who may passe for a Confessor, having suffered, and long by the Bigotts of both Parties’. In our sceptical and self-consciously tolerant age, Erasmus seems at times to be coming into his own. Until quite recently, the modern revival of Erasmus and his legacy has ...”

“... but it is true.’ ‘The terror-fantasies of one generation,’ he reminds us later, ‘may – like some of the writings of Kafka – eerily anticipate the realities of the next.’ This, of course, was the starting-point of Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 treatise From Caligari to Hitler: but Professor Prawer finds broader and deeper justification for ...”

“... the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII, opened, and that could have made Michael a good-luck charm in Alex’s eyes. But Michael is neither a film buff nor a historian of the ...”

“... which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself up with the masters may be studied in Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, compiled by Leonard Louis Levenson, which contains more than a hundred and eighty entries credited to L.L.L.; in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations, compiled by Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert V. Prochnow ...”

“... danger of “seeing the light”, “being saved” etc is that this tremendous experience may deceive the newly converted into believing that his spiritual journey is over.’ He is perfectly right, as any ci-devant member of a hellfire sect can confirm. In the testimony meetings of my youth, so much weight was put on the essential instantaneousness ...”

“... points to other circuits too – circles, tropes and connections that our eyes and ears may complete. A suite of memorial poems – each composed of ten lines of ten syllables – ties the project together through ‘the ear’s yearning, oír in memoir: Ng Ng,/ Yeh Yeh, Nana y Tata’, ‘syllables like/ teething stones’, like a ‘wren’s song ...”