“... mind. So effective a freedom fighter was he, at least on one front, that his message and his books may now seem not much more than literary curiosities. He settled down in his own lifetime to being a well-known brand of licensed English eccentric, rearranging evolution and Shakespeare’s sonnets, proving that the author of the Odyssey was a woman, crossing ...”

“... on, perhaps, the government could afford to be more conciliatory. The current Liberal regime of Robert Bourassa has toyed with proposals to soften the language laws, but has left them essentially unchanged in the interest of ‘social peace’ – fear of nationalist wrath if, for example, commercial signs in English were to be allowed. In recent years the ...”

“... impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe Florey (ours), it still holds good for those in the Waugh industry. The English ...”

“... Home Rule came closest to a threat: in the end, it too was absorbed. Where continuity reigns, we may expect the party of continuity to rule. No wonder Disraeli, an essential though not impartial witness, called Toryism ‘the English system’. Yet, as Maitland reminded us long ago, the past was once the future. ‘Who would have thought in the ...”

“... love and all its smart,    Then sleep, dear, sleep. Apart from all this, the reader may receive an illusive impression that the whole thing must have been translated from the French, in which language it would at least sound very much more natural. And yet, amazingly, the emotion, the true and abject affliction, come through, and begin to move ...”

“... codex. As early as 125, what later became Biblical text already took the form of a book. The book may give way to the screen some time soon but it has been with us now for two thousand years – and de Hamel’s main argument is that it is essentially the product of our Biblical culture. So, the jagged triangle in the Rylands is the closest we can get to our ...”

“... gust of wind at a review was not. This misfortune befell the Duke of Wellington in Hyde Park on a May day in 1829. Much of the blame lay with his Guards bearskin cap, nearly two feet high, which he was wearing instead of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers ...”

“... these Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and ...”

“... policy, healthily excited by the new, politically and socially aware, but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities ...”

“... The model of practical philosophy must take the place of a theoria whose ontological legitimation may be found only in an intellectus infinitus that is unknown to an existential experience unsupported by revelation. This model must also be held out as a contrast to all those who bend human reasonableness to the methodical thinking of ...”

“... quelled religious enthusiasm in Europe. If national identities grow weaker, religious identities may harden and long-forgotten disputes re-ignite. Evangelical religion thrives on population mobility and social change: the frontierless European Community and the newly-liberated countries of Eastern Europe may both prove ...”

“... the Rothermeres, or even Lord Northcliffe, were pipsqueaks running parish magazines. They may have sought to influence the political complexion of a large Western democracy, but Murdoch is in the business of changing the cultural complexion of the entire world. If Mr Shawcross has a single clear message for us, it is that Murdoch is not driven by lust ...”

“... At certain moments, which, given there is less and less time to think, may be fleeting, one question surely crosses the mind of most adult readers: do we actually need to hear from professors? Do we, for example, need professors of music to tell us about the songs of the Beatles, or professors of philosophy to tell us that philosophy is dead, or professors of linguistics to tell us about children’s speech, or professors of film to tell us how the sign system is working in Psycho? Aren’t there moments when we are all liable to turn into Uncle Vanya, and start wondering where we left that revolver? Doubts about professors (as against, say, prophets) don’t always mean doubting individuals who are ‘professors ...”

“... Robert Hughes​ has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he communicates in this biography, together with much useful information, forcefully expressed, about the rival factions at the Bourbon court, the Napoleonic invasion, the evolution of bull-fighting, what a maja was, what guerrillas were. This is mixed with some less useful observations – there were in those days priests who ‘groped boys’ and were ‘quite as bad’ as their modern counterparts – and some errors, as when Hughes claims that the curls of pubic hair in the Naked Maja are certainly the earliest in Western art ...”

“... 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 ...”