“... time I crossed into Templecombe Road, she was hobbled, resting at the curb, while I skipped like a lamb. An act of transference that left me obscurely guilty. And which seemed to conjure, as a direct consequence, a cat’s cradle of blue and white incident tape. There is an agreement in Hackney: the police come out early, mobhanded, squad cars, vans, a ...”

“... life. WTO tariffs of up to 40 per cent would be destructive for sheep farming: there could be mass lamb culls, and possibly civil unrest. His response was to tell farmers: ‘The more you prepare, the less likely it is that there will be difficulties.’ It sounds like a warning. Yet it isn’t clear that a deal made under Johnson would be any more ...”

“... and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire itself was not ...”

“... someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact. Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger: Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the ...”

“... be put on them. Yet they remain conventional, and surprisingly unaffected by contrary indications. Robert Brenner has shown, pretty conclusively, how little the onset of the Slump in America can be explained by wage repression, or the end of the postwar boom by wage explosion. He has also proposed a genuine theoretical explanation, of the kind Kondratiev was ...”

“... was the circle’s centre. Through Hunt, Keats met Shelley, Godwin, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and many others who would challenge and comfort him, patronise and defend him, feud over and around him, get drunk and silly with him, delight and disgust him, and otherwise matter to ...”

“... a fair amount of that.You weren’t encouraged, as we were, to go in for little whimsical Charles Lamb-like essays? Writing trivia about trivia?No. The senior English master was a raging Leavisite, an absolute caricature.Had he been to Cambridge?No, he’d been to Southampton and had been thoroughly instructed there by a sub-Leavisite. At that ...”