“... his previous employers without our knowing that they had a connection.Another Labour grandee, Peter Mandelson, who was made a peer in 2008, also has his own consultancy business, Global Counsel, which recently spent £36,000 on seconding a staff member to the office of the Treasury minister Tulip Siddiq for six months (another member of Siddiq’s team ...”

“... gradually became more formal and more centralised. First the bishops became involved, acting, as Peter Brown puts it in his brilliant study The Cult of the Saints, as ‘spiritual impresarios’. Then it was the turn of the Popes, such as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an ...”

“... of the mid-Seventies, notably the inflationary impact of the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. The frank admission of ‘the benefit of two decades’ hindsight’ prefaces the chapter on the Heath Government, coupled with the verdict: ‘His errors – our errors, for we went along with them – did huge harm to the Conservative Party and to the ...”

“... every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying – ‘like Peter Pan’, he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colombe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as he put it himself, about ‘the countries ...”

“... and finally of US-centred literary theory. ‘Tropologists’ such as Hayden White and, latterly, Frank Ankersmit made their own attempt to fill the vacuum by suggesting that, since there was apparently no other structural principle to hand, the kernel of historical writing must be found in its exemplification of deep, ahistorical literary forms – which is ...”

“... it is just finished. It has been too long in the making to have the freshness of something like Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. It would be absurd to make this a reason for underestimating its old-fashioned virtues: there are things which were done better then. And political questions remain to which no clear answer can be expected: will it be finished ...”

“... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...”

“... into its own: its complacencies, tyrannies and inhibitions now seem positively seductive. Peter Gay proposes to write a series of six volumes on ‘The Bourgeois Experience’, of which this is the second, and it is clear that he is on the way to sales and success. Shrewdly, the first two volumes deal respectively with sex and love as parts of the ...”

“... a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature a number of the children or ...”

“... Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long as he remained in Trieste or Zurich or Paris he was able to take the part of maestro, conducting the chorus of voices in the parlour of the grandest house they had ...”

“... knowing, is senseless, even delusional.’This ‘epistemic humility’, as the historian Daniel Frank calls it, is also on show in The Guide to the Perplexed’s discussion of divine attributes. At first this section may seem bold in its embrace of the deliverances of philosophy; Maimonides explicitly rejects the apparent meaning of many scriptural passages ...”

“... is most successful when it is describing these years. The list of names here, from Val Parnell to Peter Brough, from Alan Melville to Jimmy Edwards, reads like a history of British Variety. Even then, unconsciously a student of Method, she would dress up in gymslip and boater, catapult in hand, to do Monica for the wireless. She went to Hollywood for the ...”

“... and strangely interminable,’ having discovered that it was by no means a matter of one night, as Peter Ackroyd conjectured in his life of Eliot. It was also, to say the least, opportunistic; he professed to be having it in order to help the Eliots in a time of trouble, and as it ended he told Colette O’Neil, as it were with a complacent sigh, how much he ...”

“... The second key pointer to the kind of government Tony Blair will lead was the appointment of Frank Field as the minister responsible for welfare reform. The Prime Minister has made it abundantly clear that he wishes to be remembered as the leader who confronted the swelling costs of welfare and reconstructed the benefits and pensions system to fit a ...”

“... agreement between Russia and Germany to build a $5 billion pipeline. In Ireland, as documented by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan in their recent bestseller about property developers,* the building industry and Fianna Fáil have spent decades in a mutually beneficial partnership. Highly favourable tax deals benefited developers in the boom years, and at the ...”