“... Pauline Kael took against the rainbow at the end of David Lean’s film Doctor Zhivago. It was a ‘disgraceful effect’, she said, ‘a coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris Pasternak’s novel, as Russian as you can get ...”

“... policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ...”

“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... central for British policy-makers even once the Soviets had got the bomb, as they still lacked the means to use it against the US. On the one hand, this situation sent British governments chasing the chimera of civilian nuclear defence. The only time that a Home Secretary – Gwilym Lloyd George in 1955 – took the matter seriously enough to propose a £1.25 ...”

“... misunderstood him, applied a name from the romantic heritage – Einfühlung, by which he means ‘the intellectual love for the objects of experience’. To the extent that it entails a capacity to be engrossed, taken out of yourself in contemplation and at one with the objects of that contemplation, this last quality, or faculty, of mind might be ...”

“... And quite right too, of course, in one sense, but the implication may be that he is extreme about means as well as ends: totalitarian. This does not follow. To be precise, Michael Foot’s love of Parliament and of Parliamentary procedures is as deep as his radicalism. The vast majority of the Labour movement share this point of view. If there are now many ...”

“... Lwoff wrote: ‘L’art du chercheur c’est d’abord de se trouver un bon patron.’ To me, this means one who suggests good ideas, helps his students along without spoon-feeding or domineering, gives them public recognition for their work and later helps them to become established as independent scientists. How do you find one? The best way is to ask the ...”

“... clear out of Russia and leave the Russians to fight it out among themselves’. In Britain, David Lloyd George had similar reservations, but his government included a passionate supporter of the intervention, the newly appointed minister of munitions and soon to be secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill.Wilson’s scepticism meant that the ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”

“... the prehistory of the type of institution, or rather types of institution, which it embodies. This means looking back, not a hundred years but two hundred, and not to London or New York so much as to Paris. That city, long the chief supplier in Europe of luxury crafts, and the centre of modern fashion, was enabled by Napoleon’s conquests to appropriate much ...”

“... last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”

“... the lexicographer and informed by the general linguist, whose global concerns are represented by David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. ‘My purpose in writing this book,’ says Professor Crystal in his preface, ‘is to celebrate the existence of human language, and to provide a tribute to those who engage in its study.’ This purpose ...”

“... of response the book provokes, if it happens to do its thing for you. Nearly thirty years ago, David Lodge wrote a brilliant essay, called ‘The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis’, republished in his collection Language of Fiction (1966). All right, this essay said, so no one with any sense ever pretended that Lucky Jim was a ...”

“... original sin, secularised as the problem of anti-social behaviour, has been remarkably resilient. David Trotter believes that what we have learned to call Modernism is more akin to the cumulative trauma of secularisation, and that if we can’t get a wholly convincing sense of the beginnings of Modernism, we can get the next best thing: a sense of what the ...”