“... aplomb in the world. As the recent chairman of Did you see? he smoothly concealed any distaste he may have felt for the more freakish performers on his viewing panel; and as the one-time pillar of Panorama he was not too pompous to play himself in Yes, Prime Minister and ask questions about the British sausage. His life has been pitched at an agreeable social ...”

“... like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... not uncommon, of that boundary becoming blurred or even disappearing, an experience that may hold a clue to the feeling, also not uncommon, that Wagner’s work is in some sense not altogether good for us.Respecting boundaries was not Wagner’s thing. Transgression he took in his stride – stealing other men’s wives when he needed them, spending ...”

“... podium’, but he was prepared to give the Hitler salute. A long-standing friend of Gadamer’s, Richard Kroner, taught philosophy at Kiel. In 1934, Gadamer reports, ‘fate intervened to throw Kroner off track’: that is to say, Kroner was sacked because he was a Jew. Gadamer took his job. Despite this little success, further balancing acts were still ...”

“... that these emotions are central is not to say that they are the most often felt; their centrality may lie in the strength of our desire to avoid them. William Miller’s suggestion has a creeping plausibility – in the playground, among teenagers, among mid-life colleagues, in the retirement home. It has a serious claim to express a human universal, valid ...”

“... its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel. It is the 1920s. Timothy Harcombe, the narrator, works with his father Clement, a faith-healer, at the Chemical Theatre in the City Road in London; his mother Cecilia died in giving him birth. Each ...”

“... if not inevitabilities’ at the heart of organic evolution, and biological possibility may, because of ‘physical constraints, be much more limited than is usually supposed’. Conway Morris states early on that he wants to ‘reopen the portals’ to find ‘a metaphysic for evolution’. His new approach, which he hopes might ‘at last allow a ...”

“... would be anti-Conservative committee-rooms, as happened in the Vale of Glamorgan by-election in May; that Arthur Scargill would be seeking to become a fully-owned subsidiary of Ron Todd? Yet all this has come to pass, and so has industrial action by academics. That is, for me, the saddest development of all. Fashions ...”

“... interpretations advanced by other scholars and critics. But however unusual this volume may look in comparison with the kind of ambitiously interpretative catalogue we have become used to, it is entirely characteristic of the series of catalogues of major exhibitions of 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven ...”

“... believed. Cromwell had always believed in the right of the Saints to be captains (not generals, it may be noted), but he had never believed in a world in which Saints took over power from gentlemen. Indeed, the letter to Hampden in which Cromwell first expressed his demand for better officers expressed a desire for officers who would go as far as a gentleman ...”

“... grand-children? When the legal barriers are lifted and the violence suppressed, some sort of hope may return, opportunities may open up, and after a generation or two there may be some success stories. But the situation is not as it was before the injustice or as it would have been had ...”

“... and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.’ But it wasn’t until May 2005, a month after Oborne’s new book came out, that a report dated 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in ...”

“... Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (1982): ‘Like most ...”

“... of your devotion as you have been of mine.’ Auberon explains: ‘I do not think, as others may decide, that the ... sentence was intended ironically. Or at any rate, not very ironically. It certainly was not intended as an embittered father’s curse.’ Well, he should know – except that, on the matter of his dad, Auberon Waugh is not the most ...”