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“... Waugh does. The progressive language of improvement is deployed with the driest irony, just as in Conrad. ‘Reluctantly, step by step, barbarism retreated,’ Waugh comments in the brief history of Azania with which the book begins: ‘The seeds of progress took root and, after years of slow growth, burst finally into flower in the single, narrow-gauge track ...”

“... Office predicting what protesters would do next. In one report, a Special Branch chief inspector, Conrad Hepworth Dixon, claimed that the city faced the threat of demonstrators carrying ‘ball-bearings, fireworks, hat pins and banner poles for use as weapons’. Ministers considered deploying the army. Senior police officers assured the government they were ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... politically destabilising competition for place and profit to operate at one remove. According to Conrad Russell, writing some time ago, the mistake of the Stuarts may have been not the elevation of Buckingham but the failure to find a substitute after his death, for as was said at the time, ‘there is now none to impute our faults unto,’ which suggests ...”

“... across your pool before loping off into the trees. In 1966, a detoxing trust-fund native called Conrad Rooks made an expensive vanity feature about addiction, Swiss clinics and ghost dances. He acquired the services of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault, Robert Frank, Ornette Coleman and Ravi Shankar. And he called his film Chappaqua. Ferlinghetti’s ...”

“... wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of restraint, family values and ‘much-mended leather ...”

“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... questionable practices, such as ‘soft commissions’ to brokers (i.e. kickbacks), that have led Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican senator from Illinois, to describe the savings industry as ‘the world’s largest skimming organisation’. Pension boards should also carry out their own research, something commercial fund managers too often leave to ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... trying to get it right. He isn’t the type of unreliable narrator later unleashed by Nabokov or Conrad or Ford Madox Ford: in fact, he wants to be as reliable as he can, but his limited knowledge will sometimes let him down, just as his country Russian does.Obviously, this narrator’s style, distinguishable from the nominal author’s but not in ways that ...”

“... debate on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and ...”

“... sir, are a drunkard, and some of you are whoremasters’ (he’s looking at Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth). Then he points to the Speaker up in his chair: ‘Fetch him down.’ When the Speaker doesn’t budge, he shouts, ‘Put him out,’ and a couple of members, rather unwillingly, drag him down, and he is marched out without the mace through a ...”

“... Hemingway sentences to see how they worked, Later, at Berkeley, she put Henry James and Joseph Conrad on a pedestal with Hemingway and agonised in a short story class with Mark Schorer that she was ‘not good enough’. The 1950s were the glory days of the New Criticism in university English departments, but Didion rejected I.A. Richards’s intense focus ...”

“... the essential, the thrilling thing was to ‘smack the pansies down’. The period covered by Peter Parker’s astonishing two-volume compilation culminates in the pansies’ at least partial vindication, the long deferred passage of the Wolfenden Committee’s recommendations into law in 1967. Together these books present for the first time an assemblage ...”