“... individual freedoms against the constraints of community and geography. Cushla’s favourite pupil, Davy McGeown, the product of an interfaith marriage, lives on a loyalist estate so festooned with flags and bunting that it looks ‘like Nuremberg’; by the end of the novel, he and his family have been ‘burnt-out’ by an arsonist, though one ...”

“... and Ray-Bans, celebrated his election on a yacht provided by a media magnate, and is married to a former supermodel. The term bling-bling seems to have entered the French language just to describe the country’s head of state. As far as the business of government is concerned, the Fifth Republic’s unwritten motto, ‘Le président préside, le premier ...”

“... amalgamated Underground Electric Railways Company briefed the calligrapher Edward Johnston and his pupil Eric Gill to create a symbol and a typeface that would give visual identity to the unified network. The Johnston Sans lettering and red, white and blue roundel of the London Underground marked the beginning of a golden age. As well as the precisely detailed ...”

“... of Republican presidential hopefuls, it’s a well-trodden career path. Take Marco Rubio, a former protégé of Bush, who is often hailed as the great other-than-white hope for a party that fares badly among younger and Latino voters. On paper, Rubio presents as an American success story in the log-cabin mould: the son of struggling Cuban immigrants, he ...”

“... there is not yet an answer.’ Here he is repeating an argument made in 1977 by Wittgenstein’s pupil and editor, Georg Henrik Von Wright, who pointed out in ‘What Is Humanism?’ that the real advances of humanism had always been marked by challenge and defiance. Only in forced retirement had humanism become associated with platitudes and ...”

“... Double Portrait and Triple Portrait, in fact show only one girl, with a single whippet in the former and a brace of whippets in the latter. As for the plants, it is notable how they compete with the people beside them – most obviously, the potted palm (one of Freud’s earliest and most prized possessions) with the man in a raincoat in Interior in ...”

“... in Kentridge’s case a barrister friend of his father who was willing to have him as a pupil – and could scrape through the not very demanding professional exams, you could be called to the local bar and become an advocate.In many of these respects South Africa mirrored England. It did so too in its formal adherence to due process and ...”

“... of two great themes in art: the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, and picturesque poverty, the former filled with smiling cherubs, the latter featuring grinning urchins. Spagnoletto was the artist we now know by the name of Ribera, who was active in Naples, then under Spanish rule; he was associated with paintings that depicted the sufferings of emaciated ...”

“... seeds of the Mack’s destruction were sown long before both fires,’ as Eileen Reid, a former head of widening participation at the school, put it in the Scottish Review – had been muted while the restoration was progressing. Now they were voiced. Listing the misjudgments and lost opportunities of more than a decade, Reid concluded: ‘The real ...”

“... and others’. He dines with princesses and is indeed everywhere that is anywhere. His dazzled former schoolmaster, evidently with little knowledge of bureaucratic procedures, foresees in 1960 that his name must appear somewhere in the next one or two Honours Lists, after the success of the London Library appeal. This ‘delightful fantasy’, as ...”

“... certain observers have insisted on what was petulant and poor in the General’s character. The former director of Le Monde, Hubert Beuve-Méry, always emphasised these defects and permitted himself to sigh at the nature of human frailty. Echoing Talleyrand’s comment on Napoleon, ‘quel dommage qu’un si grand homme soit si mal élévé,’ he ...”

“... in other words, not solely on the basis of their examination results. Sir Cyril Norwood, a former headmaster of Harrow who was commissioned to design the postwar curriculum for England’s state schools, gave similar advice in 1943. Parents’ wishes should be given ‘due consideration’ when their children were allocated secondary schools, while ...”

“... from the high philosophical India of Professor Radhakrishnan, the first President of India and a former Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at All Souls, but quickly metamorphoses into the languors and evasions of a small-town bureaucratic conversation between superior and subordinate. ‘“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the ...”

“... attend schools that aren’t falling down. And they could demonstrate the pointlessness of the pupil premium, the Lib Dem nostrum dear to Clegg’s heart, in the context of other education cuts and a failing economy. The second is to act from strength, and promise to restore the NHS’s funding. During the election Cameron insisted that the NHS budget ...”

“... how patients weep so easily when lying on their backs. Some do so in the first hour. Why?’ One former student remembers being instructed to lie down and ‘breathe deeply, as though you’re having sexual intercourse’, while Neill prodded her stomach (she was too young to know what sex was, so she just panted). ‘The repressed ones have stomachs like ...”