“... Thatcher if he chose. Lawson attached a personal memo to the one supplied by the Cabinet Office in May 1985, in which he said that ‘the proposal for a poll tax would be completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.’ But he did nothing to follow up on this warning and the plan was allowed to continue on its merry way. Lawson had decided that Thatcher ...”

“... excerpts from published memoirs and reviews, and photographs taken on and off the set. It may be a close call for non-initiates, but I think the trip is worth the expense. Aficionados tend to divide between two touchstones, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I belong to the first group but can see the point of the second: which way you go ...”

“... to utter words and to do so with unquestioned commitment to meaning. What the voice is singing may be swallowed up by the music, but that it is singing with an urgent intention to speak to us is how we know that the song is alive.It is easy to forget that when Schubert wrote his songs, the public lieder recital did not exist. The nearest thing to it was ...”

“... but thereafter the indoctrination of all Ultra recipients, with a few possible exceptions which may have included General Freyberg in Crete, included, as the word implies, a full explanation of the nature of the beast. If the cover device still continued in use for some time for the dissemination of Ultra, it did so chiefly for the purposes of security in ...”

“... was especially crucial to the natural experimentalism of the American arts.’ Pound’s poetry may be ‘flawed and idiosyncratic’, but ‘he knew all the time that he was fighting for a new poetry and a new interpretation of all the literature and culture of the past.’ Williams ‘believed in the power of distinctive American speech to give writing a ...”

“... railway in Yunnan. The term bandit is vague. In sufficiently remote districts a ‘bandit’ may consider himself a member of the local gentry, receiving rents. The presence of non-Chinese tribesmen in the hills rather complicated the problem for us; some students believed that these people needed a severed head for the autumn sowing, which was very ...”

“... Clutch my hand.        Stay with me. The fields are mined by the enemy. Tell me we may be friends again. Far from the wisdom of the blood I saw a child reach from the mud.        Clutch my hand.        Clutch my heart. The fields are mined and the moon is dark. The Blue Vein River is in full flood. Far from the wisdom of the ...”

“... point of view.’ This Laodicean stance characterised Nick Jenkins from the beginning; and it may have been a convenient perspective for the narrator of such a long and variegated sequence of novels. It also reinforces Powell’s claim that ‘envy, hatred and malice ... are almost always disadvantageous’ when writing novels. Yet like many comic ...”

“... as W.J. Bate has recently shown, is not borne out by the facts.’ This happy unanimity may indeed have been achieved within Harvard Graduate School, but over the rest of the globe no one is quite sure. Bate does have two searching pages on the padlock: but the ‘facts’ are by no means self-evident in their nature or in their bearing. Bate says ...”

“... have approved of Banville’s refusal to be reductive. Commonplace facts – Edward’s cancer – may have the last word. But inseparable from that matter-of-factness is the celebration of humble things and circumstances that are outside (but not excluded from) the human acts of perception, comprehension and symbolisation. The narrator writes of Edward: ‘I ...”

“... are extended, the state needs to know much more of such matters than it has heretofore. But this may be in conflict with the secrecy traditionally said to be essential to the market system. Multinationals pose the challenge of surveillance on a global scale. Accountants, if invited, can bring a form of rationality into the business system – but only up to ...”

“... the way Buckley is heading, although the success of the first three books – all best-sellers – may incline him to stick with what he has got. Does Who’s on first portray espionage as it really is? I think so. (I am about to give away the ending, so anyone who plans to read the book should stop here.) Oakes kidnaps the Russian scientist and gets from him ...”

“... these dismal circumstances, it seems prudent to consider the long-term or structural changes which may explain the present conjuncture. One such change is the increase in employment in low-productivity services, particularly those paid for by public expenditure. Another is the increase in resources spent on protecting the physical environment. The economics of ...”

“... man who gets involved in advertising when he wants to be a journalist.’ She was writing Frost in May. It was tough competition, but he was to have his own successes as a writer of stories. The lunch where Nika Hulton, Edward’s super-managerial Russian wife, launched her frontal attack is a set-piece to make defenders of proprietors’ rights think ...”

“... of which many islands of solidarity have their place. One is bound to conclude that these islands may make people happy, but are not likely to stimulate them into industrial achievement. The obsession with class is the very opposite of an obsession with money, or with promotion. It is the obsession of a society which has never fully entered the modern ...”