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“... the government’s strategy in the upcoming inquiry will be to blame the scientists. The report, frank in many respects, has an echoing, cathedral-like silence around the personal responsibility of the prime minister. But as Calvert and Arbuthnott make clear, Johnson’s leadership, or lack of it, was central to the government’s failure, then and ...”

“... once music by Muzak was installed, while, at St Joseph’s Hospital in Yonkers, NY, Dr Frank B. Flood, chief of cardiology, saw improved recovery rates in the intensive care unit.From the start, the two cardinal aims of Muzak’s operation have been that its music should not draw attention to itself and that it should work in optimal co-operation ...”

“... the same level of normative literary language as the surrounding narration, here the writer comes close to assigning substandard Hebrew to the rude Esau. The famished brother cannot even come up with the ordinary Hebrew word for ‘stew’ (nazid) and instead points to the bubbling pot impatiently as (literally) ‘this red red’. The verb he uses for ...”

“... his appalled ‘non-fiction’ book about Stalin and Communism, reviewed in the LRB by Frank Kermode under the rubric ‘Amis’s Terrible News’. For the novelisation, his sources – a narrow range – aren’t so much embellished as systematised, artfully reshuffled and newly dealt. In Koba the Dread Amis, following Solzhenitsyn, wrote that in ...”

“... and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the unfurling, regal drapery behind him (from his collection of Malayan fabrics), to the ...”

“... also an inherently unstable fiction.’This isn’t to say that pre-modern societies forbade frank speaking on principle. In classical times, free citizens were able to speak their minds in the assembly on matters of public interest, civic or religious. In Athens, this liberty was called parrhesia (speaking everything), in Latin, licentia. This sort of ...”

“... Michael Gove the slyest and Boris Johnson the most popular of his colleagues, neither of them close to the ERG, both actuated by career rather than conviction – declared themselves for Leave.In parliamentary terms, Remain still had a winning hand, since Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens were all theoretically with Cameron, who ...”

“... her life, she said, and he was to be the sixth. They lived together for seven years, and remained close until Beauvoir’s death in 1986, a year after her essay in praise of Shoah appeared on the front page of Le Monde. Beauvoir was 17 years older than Lanzmann and excited by his raw spontaneity, a ‘foreign’ temperament that made her feel ...”

“... you a sexist.’ On 3 December 2006, the Sunday Telegraph reported that a focus group convened by Frank Luntz, a Republican ‘strategic communications’ consultant, had compared Cameron to Tunbridge Wells, a cat, white wine and a Rolls Royce. They had also given snap descriptions of the Tory leader: ‘family man’, ‘posh’, ‘English’, ‘nice but ...”

“... particulars from the abstractions which are their surrogates.’ The important things in Freud lie close to the ground, which makes his world of particulars vulnerable in paraphrase. And this is a problem for biography. Psychoanalysis set out to show rather than tell, and to redress the immemorial injury of speaking for the subject. Telling us what is wrong ...”

“... And with the cinema too music is often the most powerful stimulant: I watched The Diary of Anne Frank for a time without tears until the arrival of some soupy music left me with two sodden handkerchiefs. So I am manifestly one of a host in whom tears are a cheap commodity. It always surprises me, therefore, when intelligent people talk with ...”

“... him for some time then came up behind him and said: ‘I’ve had my eye on you. You get too close to the pictures.’ Sir Denis went to the Director and complimented him on the vigilance of his staff.25 March, Yorkshire. Everybody else seems to have seen the comet, but though I’ve been up on the roof several times searching the Northern sky like ...”

“... suicidal depression, he wrote dozens of letters – sometimes twenty or thirty a day – to his close friends and family, until some relief arrived in the form of an early encounter with psychoanalysis. Lewis suggests that analysis filled the vacuum that Christian Science had left – as a belief system that offered explanation and comfort. Certainly he ...”

“... sorcery I do. Being damned, I am amused to see the centre of love diffused ... That, with its frank recognition of relish, helps to explain how, in present-day war, a nice boy like Nikolai Rostov can be killed. There’s an impressive poem by R.N. Currey which begins, ‘This is a damned inhuman sort of war’ – a longer, more diffuse but more ...”

“... a spy network, a nest of Freemasons whose emblem was not an apron but the old school tie, quick to close ranks if one of its members came under suspicion, a conspiracy against the decent sort of England that Beaverbrook stood for, determined not to permit the cleansing transatlantic wind of the kind McCarthy unleashed in Washington to blow through the ...”