“... Network, at which point it would have been safe to bet on the abolition which followed in 1970. It may be that future Whiteheads will see this not as an event final in itself, but rather as a step towards the now threatened total dissolution of the BBC. At the time, the process of diminution and final abolition seemed catastrophic, a matter for organised ...”

“... Sometimes he saw himself less as a spy than as a very high-class gossip writer. He may have allowed men to go to their deaths, and even taken some risks himself, but he has trouble believing that the information he conveys is of any importance. Anyway, as he tells his interviewer, ‘I did not spy for the Russians. I spied for Europe.’ And ...”

“... who know nothing of swords, ploughs or books. But the process of change, however improbable it may have been, cannot be put into reverse. So what will happen next? To what uses will the enormous productive capacity of industrial societies be put? What novel modes of thought and behaviour will the next advances in knowledge and technique bring in their ...”

“... allowed to persist beyond a moment or two of genial acknowledgment. To fall in love with oneself may, as Oscar Wilde observed, be the beginning of a lifelong romance, but to fall in love with the lengthened shadow of one’s writerly possibilities as projected by the mellow light of kindly critical attention – that is the beginning of folly. The act of ...”

“... so that the imprints of their soles can be compared with those of the 15-year-old unknown who may be the narrator’s brother. The macabre element is reinforced by a chance encounter with a hearse-driver in the carpark outside the university canteen, which, the driver tells them, is famous for its ‘cordon bleu’ cooking. This loquacious character is ...”

“... philosophers like David Armstrong and Donald Davidson, who identify mental with neural events. I may add that although the acceptance of physicalism, in one form or another, is widespread among contemporary philosophers, with some notable exceptions, such as that of Karl Popper, I myself have still not been converted to it. Koestler’s most ambitious work ...”

“... I write these entries in my diary over the Easter weekend. By the time they appear in print they may have turned out totally false. Such is the penalty of trying to foretell the future. An historian should have more sense. I add a couple of footnotes to what I suppose we should call the Falklands Crisis. The first is to do with the Labour Party. In recent ...”

“... view that ‘the novelist’s task is “to reproduce” ’ she tells us: ‘Nature or Life may serve as an arbitrary starting-point, yet there is no doubt that all its plants and flowers are already producing patterns and embroideries that cry out for interpretation, for the retracing of their history of perception and reproduction’ (my italics). It ...”

“... Bogart and go home with Paul Henreid. The people who are swept up into the world’s fantasy life may no longer be film stars, but they exist and they are vulnerable. Ask Yoko Ono. Nor has the demand for symbols of purity, even virginity, disappeared. Ask Lady Diana Spencer. The longing for idols does not change, nor does the pleasurable horror when they ...”

“... Thackeray. It is crucial that the book, responsibly preoccupied with historical reality so that it may then be – in the terms of its subtitle – ‘A Vision’, should watch its own sense of fact: how else could it honourably report a debate between Father Cuthbert and Charles Bradlaugh on whether ‘Jesus Christ was an Historical Reality’? Father ...”

“... in the words of Lévi-Strauss, it only exists as ‘retrospective reconstruction’, the past may turn out to be a fictional as well as a foreign country. Thus history is both less than the past and, because it is translated into modern terms, more than the past. At the personal level, all our pasts are ‘history synthesised by the imagination and fixed ...”

“... features – one relating to voicing and the other to place of articulation. The phoneme may be said to be a bundle of such distinctive features – ‘a complex, simultaneous construct of a set of concurrent units’. On the other hand, the syllable – a difficult concept that Jakobson does not define – is to be regarded as ‘a constructive ...”

“... to change and the constitution was more flexible than the myth of Venice suggests. Finlay’s book may be criticised on a number of counts. It slides rather too easily from the narrow period, 1490-1530, which, thanks to Sanudo, he knows best, to the wider period, 1450-1630, which he knows rather less well. The organisation of the book is somewhat confusing. A ...”

“... in their efforts to be liked. He compares them to schoolchildren wheedling: ‘Sir! Oh sir! May I walk with you, Sir?’ There’s too much sucking up and trying to be clever. They must all learn they’ll never get round me. Other poets are there to be made use of, especially their metres. Kipling is handy – The Gods of the Copybook Headings treat ...”

“... triumph over the Forum Report has been to reduce any other dimensions or subtleties there may be in the document to this one insistent and well-publicised reiteration. All 11 months of talk, hearings and effort have boiled down to a single statement: ‘Only unity can stop the violence in Northern Ireland.’ In his interviews he has allowed for no ...”