“... You never seem to be able to get the numbers right in this industry,’ lamented Sir Norman Siddall, who bravely filled the gap between the Coal Board chairmanship of Sir Derek Ezra, supreme servant and subtle bureaucrat of consensus, and that of Sir Ian MacGregor, vieux terrible of confrontation. ‘There is either too much or too little ...”

“... rather than be thought ‘difficult’.A propos of which is Whitman’s description of himself to Edward Carpenter: ‘An old hen … with something in my nature furtive’.2 February. Late for a final rehearsal for the tour of Talking Heads I rush out of the house on this bright spring-like morning to be confronted by a large pile of excrement on the ...”

“... said he hated New York for the greed and envy at Elaine’s, but he talked about Truman Capote and Norman Mailer as he did ten years ago – as rivals and enemies, coming back to them obsessively. Worst of all the New York crowd was Alfred Kazin – ‘Saul Bellow called him the conductor on the gravy train. Wherever they were passing out ...”

“... inns, unlike their rich metropolitan colleagues; he could certainly deploy an obscure statute of Edward I in an argument about local pleadings. But what is most remarkable is his sophisticated historical analysis of the law and legal change, going far beyond the Norman Yoke theories of Levellers and Winstanley invoked in ...”

“... this ethnocentrism needs a political explanation. One might contrast his approach with that of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said has described 19th-century Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’, ‘a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the ...”

“... unintentionally hilarious pages. Throughout, he refers to himself in the third person, rather as Norman Mailer and my small children do; though my kids, of course, do it only when they know they’ve been naughty and wish to neutralise rage with bogus charm. Gay Talese did all this dreary work – nearly a decade of listening to socially disorganised wankers ...”

“... habitable and amiable piece of country. Prehistoric settler, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane and Norman all found acceptable homes within it. The legacies they have bequeathed to the landscape occupy the preliminary chapters of a text that gets into its stride with a review of the great medieval residences and the lofty perpendicular churches in which the ...”

“... books like The Well of Loneliness. It would have served him right if he had been indexed under Norman Douglas. Almost the only dates furnished by Mr Murphy are of issues of American magazines in which collections of sayings have appeared. Thus Sydney Smith (without the Reverend) appears by courtesy of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and so do Heine and Lord ...”

“... 1894, the firm achieved real notoriety and inspired innumerable parodies, comic verses and quips. Norman Gale, a long since forgotten poet, produced one of the better ones: One more unfortunate Volume ungodly Rashly importunate Gone to the Bodley. Punch’s ‘Uncleanliness is next to Bodliness’ particularly pleased Lane, one of whose more agreeable ...”

“... I’ve sat on the lawn reading the Block Prince’s Register and other sources for the reign of Edward III. On Tuesday I took a complete holiday. Taking sandwiches I left college at 8.40 a.m., called for Rowse at All Souls, and walked through the early morning sunshine to the station. There we took the train to South Leigh. It was ten by the time we arrived ...”

“... followed with bated breath every pronouncement from the lips of the Bank of England’s Montagu Norman, Germany’s Hjalmar Schacht and their lesser colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. With tragic consequences for millions of American families, and far more terrible repercussions in Europe, governments almost everywhere accepted their remedy for the ...”

“... the last thirty years is to compare the introductions to the first and most recent editions of Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward’s Guide to the Architecture of London. In 1983, they wrote of a city in decline, its population down by about a sixth from its postwar height. ‘London is cleaner and uglier than it was at the beginning of the century; but ...”

“... would have blown itself apart before any appreciable thermonuclear processes were initiated. Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, émigré scientists from Hungary and Poland respectively, who were working at Los Alamos, found an ingenious solution in 1951. As part of his work on improved fission weapons Ulam had suggested a two-stage fission design. Teller ...”

“... In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an essay on, say, narrative. On this occasion, however, he was writing not about literary texts but about the Palestinian troubles: an affecting topic, on which he writes with eloquence and with a generosity of vision which deserves the respect even of those whose loyalties are opposed to his ...”

“... had perfected the snake, the rat and the toad that he began work on designing the scab.In an Edward Thompsonian echo, Seumas Milne reminds us of the British tradition of police espionage by quoting from the constitution of the London Corresponding Society, drawn up in 1795: ‘Extreme zeal is often a cloak of treachery.’ Since well before the time of ...”