“... Recording the moment Samuel Johnson startled his friends in 1775 by declaring patriotism to be the ‘last refuge of a scoundrel’, Boswell felt that the definition needed to be glossed. Johnson ‘did not mean’, he assured readers, ‘a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest ...”

“... the Russian republic in the North Caucasus, was a test of many things, but of Russia’s claim to be an open society in particular. Leaving aside the special case of the assault on the Russian Parliament in Moscow in October 1993, this is the first full-scale military action in which the Russian state has engaged on what it perceives to ...”

“... or through early environment, and are not in themselves deliberately vicious men, they should not be punished. To punish in such circumstances is to persecute, to persecute a minority, to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes. Lord Arran, House of Lords, 12 May 1965 Producing a documentary to mark the 30th anniversary of the legalisation of ...”

“... of the treats on offer in the Millennium Dome, we must face up to the fact that no one seems to be more important to a nation than its most famous and beloved clowns. It’s surprising, then, that there is such a dearth of good writing about comic heroes; and that throughout the small number of worthwhile books devoted to these figures, there should run ...”

“... grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited ...”

“... the level of deprivation to which British children had been reduced. These memories were refreshed by reading Austerity Britain, David Kynaston’s huge history of the country between 1945 and 1951. It is difficult for anyone familiar only with the shimmering prosperity of contemporary Western Europe to realise just what it ...”

“... way she put it.’ Well, it does matter, I think, though I’m not totally sure. One seems to be a category (unfortunately) within the discipline of literature, while the other suggests two equal but different disciplines. Still, I’m at a loss to know what question is asked by either. But then I read the seminar ...”

“... when you set out to look the present in the eye but can’t quite bear the thought? Much of David Marquand’s powerful essay about ‘Britain, now’ is an elegy for a lost past, unsullied by ‘masterless capitalism’, a sad story of the light growing dim, good running to bad, the public realm hollowed out ...”

“... In​ scope and ambition David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking is reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both offer a strident critique of Western civilisation. For Said, the West’s representation of the Orient is an ideological distortion in the service of Western imperialism. The Oriental is the Other against whom the West defines itself and whom it tries to dominate ...”

“... Augustus John. Yet, when she is referred to publicly, her stature as an artist is qualified by the information that she was the lover of one and the sister of the other. She is often described as an artist ‘in her own right’. I hate that term: it implies that ‘her’ position as an artist is established only in relation to her ...”

“... sometimes say, is too far from God and too close to the United States of America. The same could be said of the whole of Latin America. Ever since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a piece of political effrontery which sought to deny a role in the affairs of the hemisphere to any extra-continental power, most North American administrations have ...”

“... Kaplan associates it with solidarity. ‘The man of seny,’ we learn from a Catalan writer quoted by Hughes, ‘renounces neither salvation nor experience, and is always trying to set up a fruitful integration between both opposed, warring extremes.’ Sounds altogether reasonable, but not as if it needs a special word. What the concept actually seems to do ...”

“... David Halle’s researches earned him a licence amateur voyeurs would kill for. He got to nose about, more or less at will, in other people’s rooms. His study of the landscapes, portraits, snapshots, saints, masks and so forth which a representative group of Americans, in and near New York, have on their walls and shelves, of how they display them and what they say about them, required that he get to know more than a hundred and sixty different houses ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... On the first day of Christmas, more bishops will be thinking about global warming than adultery, or so a survey by the Church of England General Synod reported in January … Strange, then, that we hear so little from the Church about the desecration of God’s earth. Perhaps your parish priest needs prompting? Jonathon Porritt, Country Living, December 1996 Priest: With sorrow for misusing and abusing the beauty and resources of the earth, we pray to the Lord ...”