“... have been inferences based on intuitions, in particular the intuition that certain sentences (‘John speaks fluently English’), though understandable, are nonetheless ‘in some way bad’, as Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott put it in their study of Chomsky, and that the ability to sense this badness is innate. Another piece of evidence for innateness, on ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though ...”

“... in an age when the great set speech was increasingly rare and platform oratory out of fashion, a major Conference speech, especially from a party leader, brought a surge of excitement at the prospect of being able to say: ‘I was there.’ ‘Do you remember Nye at Brighton in 1957?’ the old sweats would say, and to the new generation in the bars they ...”

“... death) did not help his case. Nevertheless a powerful counter-attack was launched on his behalf by John Terraine, and these efforts found some support among the new school of ‘War and Society’ historians such as Professor Brian Bond and the present writer, who argued that Haig’s faults were those of the old Army as a whole, and that the problems he faced ...”

“... Joe Simpson’s ‘voice’ that kept him right on his agonising descent). It is a mark of John Harrison’s quality in Climbers that he never milks accidents to produce climactic passages. Climaxes, sexual or other, are something he avoids. His cinematic eye and vocal mimicry are preternatural and enable him to be intense without melodrama. He is at ...”

“... of lyrics, Goddard is the culmination of all his rock ’n’ roll predecessors – Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen – as well as what’s best in funk, soul, reggae – and, of course, the influence of such master saloon singers as Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett. In Goddard’s music ...”

“... which people struggle to make a life after crushing grief, and, for a writer, not an uncommon way. John Evelyn did the same thing when his daughter, Margaret Godolphin, died in 1678, but wiser, I think, than these, he did not publish. Of these two books, the Zorzas’ is the worse, and for the sad reason that it is, in the literal sense, the more ...”

“... might have been more accurate – between the judges and Tory ministers in the final years of the Major Administration. At huge length he regurgitates the argument that attended Howard’s plans to extend sentences for serious crimes. This argument was a sham: the statute law is full of minimum and maximum sentences set down by government. Howard sought ...”

“... I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman ...”

“... literary couple exchanging enthusiasms and ideas with an effervescence that is implicitly sexual. John Dunton, a later and better known bookseller, developed this format when he founded the first literary magazine, the Athenian Mercury, in 1694. His find was a young woman from Somerset, Elizabeth Singer, who sent in poems praising King William. She was hailed ...”

“... preceding Classes’. Even this relatively simple task appeared to be beyond many local officials. John Rickman, who, following the lead of France and the United States, had dreamed up the idea of a nationwide head count and persuaded Parliament to back it, described the enumerators as men ‘who answer plain questions with much sincerity, but to whom ...”

“... he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of neo-Romantic whimsy from the lyrics of the group Supertramp: Just as long as there’s two of us, just as long as there’s two of us I’ll carry on. Mutatis mutandis, here is the same, rather deprecatory ...”

“... commensurate with her sense of her artistic achievements. Her domestic regime was supported by a major-domo, two maids, a cook, a gardener, a houseman-cum-assistant gardener and eventually a chauffeur. As Philip Waller remarks in his extraordinary compendium of turn-of-the-century literary life in Britain, ‘Corelli’s sense of grandeur was the inverse of ...”

“... its strange and extreme silentness’. Coleridge wrote this line in 1798, a couple of years before John Marsh finished the first part of his History of My Private Life, and a reading of ‘Frost at Midnight’, along with some of the other ‘Conversation Poems’ – ‘The Aeolian Harp’, ‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’, ‘The Nightingale’, for ...”