“... of a historical phenomenon. The occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York ...”

“... of her civil servants, and of a political spectrum of Junior Ministers from Michael Meacher to David Owen. It now appears that she was often less loyal to them in her thoughts. But we must leave God to try her for these. It was by her actions that she led them, and from out in front. She lived in the shadow of ‘In Place of Strife’, which looms over the ...”

“... was even slighter. I saw Coward first in New York in 1962 at one of the regular parties given by Arnold Weissberger, a showbusiness accountant. The party was, as ever, stiff with celebrities, the most glamorous to me being the now slightly faded film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve ...”

“... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...”

“... about ‘sex depravity’. The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an ...”

“... back in good order on the sterling old tradition of the heart being in the right place, as in Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, and it moves rather close to John Wain’s posthumous novel, in his Bildungsroman series about a young man growing up in Oxford – a trifle ironical in view of Amis’s strongly-expressed disdain for Wain’s mode and temper of ...”

“... didn’t feel she had been well seated. Never mind; I was able to introduce Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of whom were very nice to him, as was Jessica Lange and as were Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey. His only autograph refusal came from Jane Fonda. I was impressed by how many people didn’t go for ...”

“... Midwest. Thompson drew the plot for Killer out of a manila folder presented to him by his editor, Arnold Hano, but it was the last plot-summary Lion Books tried to hang on him. ‘You unleash a guy like that,’ Hano once said, ‘you don’t try to direct him.’ And unleashed Thompson very definitely was; even the titles of his books testify to a terrible ...”

“... At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience: congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands Like so many messy table napkins ...”

“... Sénancour’s ‘inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness’. Those words of Matthew Arnold, half yearning and half disapproving, imply the curious relation between romantic swimming as balm and symbol of the death-wish, and public school swimming as it might be called – a bracing and brutal baptism to banish mollycoddling and drive morbid ...”

“... Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says ...”

“... knew he could do, except to try to do them at a continuous, towering level. It led, as we learn in Arnold Rampersad’s new biography, to endless perfectionism in smaller and smaller publications (‘perfectionism that was clogging his arteries as a writer’, Rampersad says), and rounds of admired speeches given on ever larger stages (up to various arts ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... Arabs were not allowed to settle or even work on land owned by the Jewish National Fund: in 1931 Arnold Toynbee noted that ‘all the Palestinian land which is purchased by Jewish funds is becoming ... an exclusive preserve for the Jews.’ However, all this is trivial misrepresentation in comparison with the author’s basic error.The immigrant ...”