“... that the commercially-orientated research done by universities, and encouraged by government, may not after all produce any net benefit to the economy: it just drives out research that would have been conducted anyway, and perhaps more efficiently, by the private sector. The more unambiguous benefit of identifying the public research university with its ...”

“... reputation rather than the book certainly tends to protect authors, if only in the short term, and may in fact benefit St Aubyn in the case of Lost for Words. Satire is supposed to bite the hand that feeds it, but for a novelist (particularly one who hasn’t been short of critical praise) to savage the world of reviewers can seem a bite too far. One character ...”

“... of pink and black, sunrise yellow and winter frost. Hacksaw sharp and baked-peach luscious. Elvis may not have been much of an actor, but he was surely made to be looked at. Boys wanted to move like him, girls wanted to unwrap him like an expensive Easter chocolate. Odd, glancing hints of femininity in his make-up (and, indeed, his make-up) distinguished him ...”

“... and see not what Latin America is but what they would like Latin America to be so that they may satisfy their personal visions.’ He makes it clear that in writing the novel he felt ‘free to change, deform and invent situations, using the historical background only as a point of departure to create what essentially would be a fiction, that is, a ...”

“... gazing entranced at some household object, or perhaps reading a letter with a half-smile; there may have been a curtain, suggestive of veiled meaning; there would have been an enigma. We concentrated on it at the expense of the enigma moving among us, smiling with gallant determination.And then the queen passed close to me and I stared at her. I am ashamed ...”

“... a difficult one. The war hadn’t been going well since the landings in the Pas de Calais in May 1946 were thrown back with terrible losses – a failure that had much to do with the amount of treasure and materiel that had been diverted to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. The Americans remained preoccupied in the Pacific, still wary of the ...”

“... be at stake. Acknowledging, in an interview with the Washington Post, the possibility that trials may be switched to military commissions, the attorney general attempted to rationalise the position: ‘At the end of the day, wherever this case is tried, in whatever forum, what we have to ensure is that it’s done as transparently as possible and with ...”

“... retrospectively alter the GDP estimate. The number goes on changing for months, indeed years. It may well be that the position is worse than it looks. It may be that it’s better: unemployment fell by 7000 in December, beating expectations, so perhaps the economy is in better nick than 0.1 per cent growth suggests. On the ...”

“... study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in economics, though Keynes may last longer. This doesn’t mean that contemporary US universities aren’t obsessed with ‘theory’, only that the ‘theory’ either comes from outside America, is modelled on economics (which has a strong theory-orientation important for understanding ...”

“... the ambitious and brutal founder of the unified Qin state in 221 BCE. At a party conference in May 1958, Mao urged the emulation of an emperor who had advocated eliminating anyone who used history to criticise the present. When Marshal Lin Biao noted that Qin Shi Huang had burned books and buried scholars, Mao replied: ‘What was Qin Shi Huang? He only ...”

“... have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.’ It may be that Winterson sees herself in converse terms, as energy without mass. Any possible historical Mrs Winterson is washed away by the opposing tides of rejection and appropriation, the speaking against her and the speaking for her. Yet there is also a fear ...”

“... is imperceptible, and those who sacrifice themselves in the interest of imperceptible improvements may not even receive the praise normally due selfless behaviour. The real-world example Olson gave was farmers in the American grain market. If a selfless farmer, worried about the suffering of his colleagues because of depressed prices, decided to lower his own ...”

“... again the grisly old law of lesbian thermodynamics: there aren’t enough of us to go around. You may be the most accomplished seductress on the planet – a glad hand indeed – but the pickings are so slim (and often dim) you’re bound to end up with Ms Wrong. Witness Barney’s second big fling – with the self-destructive poetess Renée Vivien. If de ...”

“... harmless. One was the rise and fall of Anglo-American literature. I use the term, in what may be too subjective a sense, to span the period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two ...”

“... and caricatures. The places where he was stationed – Paris, Auteuil, Neufchâteau – may have helped him develop a taste for the Old World illustrations used in parts of Cinderella and Fantasia; he may only have been educated up to the age of 15, but he wasn’t unworldly. In 1920, having returned to a job as a ...”