“... than he ever knew in his life. He is an easily quoted exemplar for standup comics like Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, Paul Reiser and Jerry Seinfeld, whose subject is the vicissitudes of the instincts and whose stock in trade is the fast one-liner. These performers are more routinely transgressive than Groucho was, and they lack the pathos that was the ...”

“... and solely responsible for meeting all its legal responsibilities . . . Let me make things crystal clear. Nothing that HSE does, or indeed does not do, can be taken in any way as confirming the adequacy of Railtrack’s actions, or inaction, under the law . . . Even where approvals are granted they should never be regarded as any kind of guarantee of ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... us – but he has made it his stock-in-trade. It does not make for intimacy of collaboration, as David Owen recognised in coining the soubriquet ‘le Roi lean Quinze’. The point about the grand manner is that it only really comes off in context, when the level of events rises to match it. They laughed at Macmillan, until he became prime minister, and at ...”

“... of socialism involving a cast of two thousand actors, singers, musicians and dancers – at the Crystal Palace, and began to advocate overthrowing the British state as a necessary means to right the wrongs of empire and capitalism. He also took part in a concert in celebration of the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, an ally of Bertolt Brecht, whose music had ...”

“... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...”

“... lithe, an inspired mimic. Everyone who met him, even those who disliked him, felt his vitality. David ‘Bunny’ Garnett noticed his ‘beautiful lively, blue eyes’, and that he was ‘very light in his movements’. He also maintained that Lawrence’s hair colour, or non-colour – it was reddish-fair – was characteristically working-class. When a ...”

“... the river. The defiant and cavalier spirit of free enterprise. They said the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace was a waste of money. They said the Festival of Britain wouldn’t pull the punters. This is a signal to the world: we can convert vision into actuality in the shortest possible space of time. You come up with the bread and we’ll give you the ...”

“... to make his case rests on his reputation as a demographer. ‘If we stick to data, the answer is crystal clear,’ he writes near the beginning of the book, which contains extensive information on population trends and voting patterns, with additional material on an accompanying website. But the further he moves away from the data, the more his argument is ...”

“... are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St ...”

“... College, ranging from mannered Georgian to Barry’s lurid neo-Gothic, with the remnants of the Crystal Palace nearby and the bizarre tower of Charles Townsend’s Horniman Museum overlooking it all. Both zones are arranged around large open public spaces: the tended royal park at Greenwich and the wilder expanse of Blackheath (where Wat Tyler assembled ...”

“... had issued everyone with Pervitin tablets, a powerful methamphetamine and an early form of crystal meth. High and wide awake, the tank drivers crashed through the forest, hidden from aerial surveillance by the canopy of fresh leaves. Blitzkrieg required its fighters to be on meth, as Norman Ohler has shown in his book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi ...”

“... Hospital, you are high up enough to see London surrounded by its hills. Harrow and Hampstead, Crystal Palace and Richmond. Hugh’s bed was by an east-looking window; Westminster in the distance, to the north the two unmistakable tower blocks of Notting Hill. The Trellick Tower to the north, the Campden Hill Towers at the Gate itself. I thought of my ...”

“... and his effort to write his name: ‘The beads of sweat grew on his low brow like transparent crystal boils ... These boils ran, ran down like tears wept by Onufrij’s brain.’ And from The Emperor’s Tomb: ‘All little stations in all little provincial towns looked alike throughout the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Small and painted yellow, they were ...”

“... or in Down and Out in Paris and London, is one to be accused of doubting the word of ‘the crystal spirit’, of destroying his reputation for integrity and honesty, or is one paying tribute to a craftsman less naive than some of the Chelsea and Bloomsbury literary friends of the days of his fame enthusiastically assumed him to be? Orwell valued his ...”