“... American readers is ‘whingeing’. Yet he has been in some ways unlucky. Born in 1948, sometimes said to be the most fortunate year of the 20th century, he is one of the baby-boomers who grew up with the National Health Service, free milk and orange juice, student grants and proper occupational pensions, none of which was of any use to him. Instead he bumped ...”

“... Tory Party and all the leading participants are obliged to state and restate what they said and did then in much the same way that the members of an earlier Tory generation had to spell out the position they’d taken over Munich. And just as Chamberlain’s deal at Munich was immensely popular for a short time and then reviled, so the conventional ...”

“... on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ... should you not rather ...”

“... In a lawsuit brought in 1610 against the nuisance caused by a neighbour’s pigs, the great lawyer Edward Coke, employed in the defence, declared that ‘the building of the house for hogs was necessary for the sustenance of man and one ought not to have so delicate a nose that he cannot bear the smell of hogs.’ Later in the century, a religious writer ...”

“... a political orator and thinker was yet to take off. Other heavyweights joined a few years later: Edward Gibbon was made a member in 1774 and Adam Smith in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick ...”

“... the computer system was (wait for it) Andersen Consulting. ‘It is clearly wrong,’ the MPs said, ‘for somebody who is tendering for National Health Service business also to be advising the National Health Service as their consultant.’ The PAC report came out in November 1993, but the Wessex scandal had already been exposed by John Denham, the ...”

“... of Jewish mysticism, was being introduced at a lecture in New York. Mysticism, the introducer said sarcastically, is nothing; but a history of nothing – well, that is science. The same can be said, multipliedly, of Derwent May’s book, which is essentially a history of the book review, a genre of such tiny dignity ...”

“... up an admirer of Nietzsche and the German intellectual tradition. He grew his moustache, so he said, ‘to convey an impression of Nietzsche’, and set himself the target, which he only just failed to reach, of becoming a professor at an even younger age than his exemplar. What with this and with his rise in the Army from private soldier to the youngest ...”

“... protect and promote their own authority and will do so unscrupulously if they must. If this can be said by an Orwell it is even better. Nor are these categories of only negative utility: a moral critique of this sort carries with it a particular imperative which political and bureaucratic systems find difficult to resist. Yet its utility can also be ...”

“... in the first paragraph, where Tuchman describes the funeral procession that followed the bier of Edward VII in May 1910: ‘The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.’ Five ...”

“... after, in the nicest possible way, she dumped him; he is still an invalid today. Kissing Marilyn, said Tony Curtis, was like kissing Hitler. As Sammy Davis Jr put it: ‘She hangs like a bat in the minds of the men that knew her.’ Or like a dove. The other portrait Miller drew of his bride was Roslyn in The Misfits, driven by her animal recoil from any form ...”

“... self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology: ‘I can answer the threat of the other as other (than I) only by transforming it into another (than itself) through altering it in my imagination.’ I recalled these oracular words when browsing in ...”

“... rein’ at the first hint of fisticuffs. He quoted with appreciation R.B. Cunninghame Graham, who said that Shaw was ‘the first man to run away from Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday’. (Cunninghame Graham went to prison as a result of the riot.) This is all of a piece with Shaw, once the youthful Fenian, having not the smallest desire to live either in ...”

“... aching lumps of flesh, crushed together and wanting to be separate ...   ‘I’m hungry,’ said Rob. I laughed aloud in relief.   ‘You’re always hungry!’   ‘Yes, but now I could eat anything. I could eat Miss Gallagher.’    It was an old fantasy of ours. How would we cook her to make her edible? Long, slow roasting after a ...”

“... Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various ...”