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“... rich fund of popular culture. Now, at last, someone has done the job. It makes highly entertaining reading. Alas, it is also deeply depressing for anyone who (like me) had high hopes of the Wilson Government at the time. Needless to say, not all the Brown saga is included in Mr Paterson’s recital – that would require thousands of pages. But many of the ...”

“... At the Dublin meeting with Albert Reynolds and John Hume, Adams put his name to a statement reading: ‘We are at the beginning of a new era in which we are all totally and absolutely committed to democratic and peaceful methods of resolving our political problems.’ Afterwards, John Hume was still being pressed about the ‘permanent’ issue by ...”

“... a singular lack of curiosity. And while the judges annually complain about the great burden of reading placed upon them, it must be the case that most of the hundred or so novels submitted can be discarded pretty quickly. I was going to say after twenty pages, until I remembered the case of a Booker judge a few years ago who was doing some early winnowing ...”

“... Let me defer here to Adolph Reed, who is emerging as one of the few black American essayists worth reading in a period of intensifying racism and of stultifying parochial loyalties, and who never lets the pressure of the first move him an inch nearer to the second: Early in the saga, there was considerable evidence of multiracial fan support for O.J., as ...”

“... obligatory references to dark, peripheral events like the Partitions of Poland or the reforms of Peter the Great – now fa1l into oblivion, not because they are incomplete but because they are distortions. Neither is this a matter of crude ‘equating’: of setting out to prove that the Counter-Reformation in Central Europe was as important as it was in ...”

“... off debts, he sold out to Mark McCormack of the International Management Group, recently hired by Peter Mandelson to raise funds for Britain’s millennium celebrations. IMG runs the finances and Bollettieri runs everything else. Bollettieri emerges from the memoir as an endearing hustler, vain (about his waistline, his teeth, his muscles, his tan) but ...”

“... to prefer one of these books above the other: each has advantages, each is the product of hard reading and great literary curiosity. Like his predecessors, Gross has an Introduction in which he tries to say what aphorisms are: not quite maxims (more subversive) and not quite epigrams (more discursive). They are, as Johnson said, ‘unconnected ...”

“... is a strength to be built upon rather than a problem to be solved. Although she implies a good reading knowledge of French, German and Russian, Miller states that she is not bilingual, not a linguist and not a second-language teacher. She is, in fact, a university lecturer in English who has also taught that subject to London schoolchildren. We ...”

“... of Seven Gothic Tales. Putnam, the English publishers, had rejected the manuscript without even reading it. Haas had taken a gamble. In the event, Seven Gothic Tales was chosen as a ‘Book of the Month’ in the USA before publication. One cannot help feeling, however, that Letters from Africa should have been attributed to the woman who wrote them ...”

“... realise that he is, in his modest and quiet way, profoundly altering our views of the past. Like Peter Brown in his studies of late antiquity, he helps to free us from a Rome-centred view of the past, and allows us to recognise that the Eastern Mediterranean was the source of Western culture, and that the art of Ireland, Spain and Norway is as important for ...”

“... do if you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and declare himself not ‘the silliest man in England’? And who would wish to be measured and perhaps ...”

“... Hobbes’s observation that they are wise men’s counters but the money of fools. Consider ‘Peter Pantheism’. How marvellous a coinage! But what is it? Its creator, I suspect, had to scratch round for an answer before fitting it into one of his innumerable ‘Our Notebook’ columns for the Illustrated London News. When, towards the end of his ...”

“... love, art, democracy and anarchism that lurched between sharp insights and total nonsense. On reading it over [Lincoln] Steffens commented that it sounded much like the writing of Gertrude Stein. Quite so; and how much more difficult it must be to recapture the character of talk before the 20th century. Most of the contributors to Mr Quennell’s volume ...”

“... from various official papers that came his way. The autobiographical fragments are sometimes good reading. I particularly enjoyed Mr Sedgemore’s account of an interview between himself and Mr Callaghan’s chief whip, Michael Cocks, in the course of which Cocks rose from his chair and looked around the room: There were three doors off it – one into the ...”

“... people are an aspect of journeying, as in immortal books like Evelyn Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days, or Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary. Bruce Chatwin’s narrative is divided by pauses for quotation and reflection. He has more than a touch of Rimbaud in him, and indeed he quotes from Une Saison en Enfer: ‘For a long time I prided myself I would possess every ...”