“... and dissimulate also seems to carry subversive tints of the sort associated with his contemporary Jonathan Swift.The Grumbling Hive provides an allegorical account of a thriving early 18th-century economy, in the form of a colony of heavily anthropomorphised bees. Christian and Stoic moralists recommended virtuous austerity, but Mandeville depicts its ...”

“... 2’ in History is a 14-line redaction of that, ending ‘my namesake, not the last Caligula’ (Jonathan Raban once suggested that Lowell’s idea of ‘revision’ was to throw on more negatives). As for ‘Caligula 1’ – that’s a revision of a translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ that first appeared in Imitations. And so on, and so on, and so ...”

“... 1969 and the moment when real money, the paper kind that came with a few silver coins in a small brown envelope, disappeared. For ever. I had a casual labouring job, unloading containers and stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a ...”

“... across the sea-loch with its stealthy, dipping flight and the ride fills nearly full, buoying the brown tangles of the seaweed, I can see time pouring in a transparent flux, across the sounds and the uplands, bearing the people away to America, lifting the houses like flotsam and dropping them near a different ferry-port, a different plot of land. Only it ...”

“... are much more suspicious of ‘high culture’. In his introduction to Political Shakespeare, Jonathan Dollimore analyses a tripartite pattern in ideological conflicts of consolidation, subversion and containment. In certain circumstances, drama may subvert the ruling ideology, but the probability is that these challenges will eventually serve to ...”

“... sublimity: I have carried it with me each day: that morning I took my uncle’s boat from the brown water cove and headed for Mosher Island. Small waves splashed against the hull and the hollow creak of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world ...”

“... me absolutely fucking crazy. All you ever talk about is junk.’ I looked over at her – brown hairs Van de Graaffing from her forehead; a pimple she’d been hoping nobody would notice caked in skin product; small, perfect teeth. I was wondering what her kiss would taste like, when she picked up a Clive Cussler novel that everyone in the pod had ...”

“... sight’, another is ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’; naturally it has been suggested that Jonathan Swift may have experienced it during his demented final years, while Charles Dodgson may have based Alice’s distortions of scale on an account of mushroom-eating Siberian shamans in Mordecai Cooke’s drug compendium, Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860). The ...”

“... nor connected with lineage: King Louis XI of France was described by a German viewer as ‘brown’. Groebner tells us that ‘the skin colours that European travellers caught sight of in various parts of the New World in the 16th century coincided with those they employed to describe their own skins.’ Only well after the 16th century, Groebner ...”

“... Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third World. Enough of ill-disciplined prose and rootless lives. Enough of ...”

“... would be ‘honest thief-takers’, not the kind in The Beggar’s Opera, or in Fielding’s novel Jonathan Wild, who colluded with criminals until it became expedient to hand them over to justice. In the early years of the runners some worked as prison turnkeys; others had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had ...”

“... Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call from the Tory whips’ office ...”

“... no archives from me period to compare with those of three centuries later so cunningly used by Jonathan Spence to construct his Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi. If we had to judge Khubilai on the basis of his appearance in later Chinese historical writings we might never be tempted to read a full biography of him at all. Many of them cheat ...”

“... to Blair and the new yuppie style. Actually, Labour would have won crushingly under Cook or Brown in 1997. And, of course, whatever the New Labour style, Labour still rests on the votes of the poorer half of the population, with certain immanent consequences that Blair is bound to discover. But very few politicians are at all good at understanding their ...”

“... then of the Wall Street Journal, who give his palace manoeuvrings and business dealings the Tina Brown treatment.* MBS is next in line to the throne of Saudi Arabia and already its de facto ruler. He is likely to reign for a very long time. He grew up the much indulged son of King Salman and his controversial third wife, Fahda, whom Salman’s elder children ...”