“... number of times in which I was entirely stumped for anything to say. Until the last few weeks I may have been the only person who, if given a word-association test for ‘Hitler’, might well have exclaimed: ‘Iraq!’ So naturally I bristled like a retriever when George Bush began to compare Saddam Hussein with the leader of the Third Reich. Of ...”

“... to self-styled patriots but also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the effort: Iraq, where the US is not doing well and where the army is made up of ‘volunteers’ from poor ...”

“... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle ...”

“... of ancient religions despite the best efforts of the best scholars to discover some kind of order. Robert Parker in Polytheism and Society at Athens, his synthetic study of gods and cults in one small but document-rich area, compares the ever-increasing pantheon to an overflowing clothes-drawer, ‘which no one felt obliged to tidy’. Nevertheless, he wants ...”

“... on the floor of his sickroom. The mess is a visible rejection of any proprietary claims that may be made on his life or his work by housekeepers or critics – versions, he would suppose, of the same thing. ‘There is all sorts of debris scattered about – bits of manuscript, letters, newspapers, books,’ Traubel writes of Whitman’s room early on in ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it ...”

“... seldom canvassed), out of many possibilities that spring to mind two should be noticed: first, we may conceive of a language – as it might be Russian, or even American English – that is less worldly-wise than British English; and secondly we may conceive of, and even think that we register around us, a linguistic ...”

“... is a way of abdicating from the inexpressible mode of being that it also sustains. The clarity may be illusory, but the Romantic dawn and the Age of Reason unite to give it a great and naive confidence, so that the reader feels it is trembling on the verge of some great revelation, some breakthrough about the state of the universe and man’s nature. As ...”

“... the bourgeoisie into buildings that house a wide range of books, among which some literature may be lurking, the public libraries must surely have made matters a little easier, if only from a logistical point of view, for those members of the middle class who are in rebellion against the philistinism endemic in their milieu. The incorrect belief that the ...”

“... applied specifically to (young) women’; and – most surprising of the entries that may variously be held to manifest sexism or a reversed sexism or the defeat of sexism – that ‘He who hesitates is lost’ in its early uses referred ‘specifically to women’. Again like any good reference book, this dictionary is ideal for family ...”

“... In a letter to Robert Liddell dated 12 January 1940, Barbara Pym speaks well of her progress on a new novel, Crampton Hodnet, which she finished later that year, but which has only now surfaced for publication: ‘It is about North Oxford and has some bits as good as anything I ever did. Mr Latimer’s proposal to Miss Morrow, old Mrs Killigrew, Dr Fremantle, Master of Randolph College, Mr Cleveland’s elopement and its unfortunate end ...”

“... constitutional revolution’: ‘“we the people” – to use a long-coined phrase that may finally become currency in Britain – have changed, especially in our relationship to authority.’ The idea of the book is unobjectionable: it asks what last May’s General Election ‘really tells us; explores the ...”

“... fought and wrote his major poems, were a small proportion of the British Army as a whole, and it may be that their early deployment in 1940 immunised them against a general political infection. I doubt this, however: not even Spike Milligan reads like that. When British forces in Cairo held a mock election under the auspices of the Army Educational Command ...”

“... unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.’ This thought-provoking assertion captures a truth about the shift from the modern to the postmodern: there is something pastiche-like about a great many contemporary writers, not least those who write in a personal voice which is in ...”

“... some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same ...”