“... of them. His idea of participation was to appear, but to appear detached. The formula caught and held a whole imitative school of lycanthropic scribblers, who could mock and jeer at the antics of the period without being so square as to be left out of the party altogether. The summit of this style – its glass of fashion and its mould of form – was ...”

“... cruelty of the elements. It comes with a recommendation by Graham Greene who says: ‘The story held me so completely ... I wish I had written this book.’ At first, this is a little surprising – for the adultery that triggers off the action is an ordinary American adultery, without sacrilegious or metaphysical overtones, and the central conflict is near ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”

“... of them became Anglican, but this seems an exaggeration. And some, while remaining in the Society, held aristocratic values and pursued an aristocratic life-style. At any rate that is the impression one gets from dipping into the Journal (1835-44) of Barclay Fox, which reveals exactly the kind of self-confident, debonair, but caring personality that ...”

“... instincts or libido shared with animals, are put first’. Always? Despised? The elders of Troy held Helen holy for obeying her libido. Respect for reason occupies a very tiny area in human history. In culture upon culture and empire after empire the prized capacities have been for reading portents in bird flight or shooting stars, discerning prophecies in ...”

“... a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from kinky tastes in sex to bad spelling and worse usage: ‘But the daisy chain ... was only just gathering speed. It was still a ...”

“... my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon – for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure.’ It enabled her to deal with publishers, and, most difficult of all, to give away money ...”

“... mistakes. Which is how I came to spend a rather chilly day on a hill north of Sarajevo watching David, with one hand tied behind his back, tackling Goliath. Having learnt that they cannot rely on the UN to save them, the Bosnian Army were answering back, attacking an advanced Serbian position on the ridge of a hill. They were using an old Russian 70 mm ...”

“... signs in English were to be allowed. In recent years the percentage of Francophones in Québec has held firm and even crept up a bit, to 83 per cent. But this stabilisation is not the result of the mass conversion of Anglo or allophones to French. The weakness in Laurin’s theory is that non-Francophones are free to move on to another province, or perhaps to ...”

“... the wooden pallets – when we notice that the lorries behind us are idling. One wagon has been held up because of a query over waybills. The rest of us cannot move on until it has caught up. A straggling truck could be prey to pirate runabouts. There is nothing to do except inhale the smell of rotting fruit. Technicals sweep past us to interdict traffic ...”

“... and other sources. The book focuses on the three sets of bilateral negotiations that Israel held between 1949 and 1952 with Syria, Jordan and Egypt respectively. The title of the book, like the poem by Robert Frost which inspired it, is rather ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. Rabinovich declines to identify those who decided not to take the road ...”

“... know this is a big movie, no skimpy, fake-ass wannabe shit.’ Lee’s idea of a big movie is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Bridge over the River Kwai. He is also a great admirer of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Later we get a better look at Shorty and Malcolm in their immaculate zoot-suits, long coats, baggy pants tight at the ankles, broad-brimmed hats ...”

“... greeted the last major Wilson exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, curated by David Solkin, now of the Courtauld Institute, certainly the best, and probably the most respected, historian of 18th-century British art now practising. In the introduction to his excellent and, as it turned out, controversial catalogue, Solkin had suggested that ...”

“... the miscarriage of justice inflicted by the British legal system on the Birmingham Six. Lord Lane held in their 1988 appeal that ‘the longer this hearing has gone on, the more convinced this court has become that the verdict was correct.’ The US Court of Appeals seems to have accepted the prosecution case wholesale, convinced itself a priori of the ...”

“... interest, and in an instant subordinates the lot to a single popular demand. It’s doubtful that David Cameron ever thought this far ahead, but in his passion for referendums (four were held during his premiership) he was testing parliamentary sovereignty to breaking point. Under these circumstances, political hegemony is ...”