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“... in this biography, that warm, complicit smile was for everyone. I can’t remember much of what he said. This is because he never said much. He was one of those rare journalists whose way of listening makes other people open up and talk. That’s what this elusive man used his smile for. That, and to take attention and ...”

“... dismemberment of health, education and welfare? ‘I wants to make your flesh creep,’ said the fat boy, and that is what the parties set out to do in 1987. As Rodney Tyler’s book shows, the key decision in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their ...”

“... the difference between being titled and being entitled. When Kermode accepted the post of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, he felt he had ‘become a sort of nobody, yet a nobody with a title, with a carnival crown’. A knighthood is not a carnival crown, but the drift of this glancing and complicated book is that no ...”

“... realised the harm the footage had done and tracked down the cameraman who had taken the pictures, Edward Chikombo. His body was discovered some days later. These events brought about a change in tactics by Mugabe and Mbeki. Mbeki’s fundamental position was that, as a fellow national liberation movement (NLM), Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF had to be maintained ...”

“... material; some were expressing private prayer; some were simply writing a poem. St Augustine said that all things written in the Psalms are mirrors of ourselves and it was inevitable that, when English poets were still largely Christian believers, they would look into the mirror of this foundational anthology of poetry, as Chinese poets looked into the ...”

“... to make a name for himself in the history of religion. Another friend, the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, had convinced him that myths originated independently around the world in the thought processes of ‘savage’ peoples. Such speculations contradicted the theories of Friedrich Max Müller, the comparative philologist who then dominated ...”

“... attempts to connect Thomas More’s defence of ecclesiastical interpretative prerogative to Edward Coke’s similar claims for legal expertise, without apparently being aware that More’s own concept of law was essentially transparent. In contrast to matters divine, More desired that secular law be written so as to ‘be read or understood by every one ...”

“... to break the law in some ways and such breaches can, or will, never be prosecuted,’ Donaldson said in January 1988. But ‘murder is an entirely different matter.’ In other words, the Master of the Rolls says that MI5 can do what they like in the public interest, even if what they like is illegal. They are expected, rather squeamishly, to stop short of ...”

“... notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof that he really believed that ‘history fades into mere literature when ...”

“... went up to post-Newmanite Oxford to encounter Ruskin and (in the form of his lifelong colleague Edward Burne-Jones) Pre-Raphaelitism. After Oxford, he and his friends set up an arts and crafts workshop in Red Lion Square and helped to paint the Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, while Morris himself unleashed an unstaunchable stream of poetry. He then ...”

“... continued to put themselves in the hands of Indian practitioners when in direst need. This, said one doctor, ‘can only throw undeserved discredit on our profession and serve to foster native prejudice against us’. As the British became more enamoured of their status as a ruling race, physical and intellectual contact with Indians had to be ...”

“... orders were always mesmerisingly sure, Amis knew what he meant. When Auden opened his mouth and said, ‘Look, stranger,’ or ‘Consider this, and in our time,’ he was listened to with rapt attention, which in itself constituted obedience to orders. Also immediate atavistic loyalty to the tall unwounded leader, which is the personal factor determining ...”

“... There are two pieces about the Titanic, two about the Lusitania and two on the abdication of Edward VIII. Considering what MacArthur omits, repetitions are irritating. (There is also a repeated typo. You may wonder who Sylvia Pankhurt is. There are Pankhursts in my family and we tend to spell it with the ‘s’.) Obviously space is limited, and whether ...”

“... to be unable to survive in the Commons: but his position had been strengthened by the failure of Edward Heath’s attempt to reach an agreement with the Liberal Leader, which established that there was no alternative government for the Queen to choose. The other aspect of the royal discretion is the right to invite a leader to form a majority administration ...”

“... with the theatre of living, with the trials and triumphs of the body. In the same way, it might be said, Shakespeare was himself compromised, at every point in his career, by what had to be done. It was the grace of the dyer’s hand to be subdued to what it worked in. There is a danger that both Eliot and Wilson Knight may be repeating, in their own ...”