“... dissident, a weapon for the unrespectable and a bane for state authorities, a living reminder to be careful what you wish for. Who then was responsible for drafting the convention and breathing life into it? It was principally the work of the European Movement, a right-wing non-governmental organisation which came into being in 1949 as the successor of a ...”

“... in drifting crinoline went out of the window, of course, along with his animated scarecrows (the B-side of ‘Arnold Layne’) and his hippie I-Chingery, but some of the grittier elements from the first Pink Floyd album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, were inadvertently recycled. You could listen to Roger Waters’s wild, largely instrumental ‘Take up Thy ...”

“... Labour has won its historic third term, by the majority (about 65) predicted by the much abused exit poll, and it has done so while receiving the lowest percentage of the vote ever won by a victorious party. The parliamentary majority is much reduced, as everyone has pointed out, but it is ‘much reduced’ only in comparison with Labour’s existing majority: previous Labour leaders would have regarded it as providential ...”

“... confections, stilted essays in what one might call the comedy of conversational manners, really be taken seriously? In a sense, yes, they can. Their rhetoric – an arch, Nabokovian, dictionary English, a formality about as ‘lifelike’ as the frigid give-and-take we find in Compton-Burnett, or in Valéry’s Dialogues – does have its persuasive ...”

“... the majority of the population,’ writes Jane Grigson, ‘vegetables as a delight, to be eaten on their own, belong to this century, even to the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the earth ...”

“... Maclean and Higgins are others – at the golden nucleus of the fiction industry. Welshman by origin, Follett is now cosmopolitan and corporate for business reasons. (I notice, incidentally, that The Key to Rebecca is Fine Blend NV. Are the coffee people setting up against the sugar people who own the James Bond copyright?) He has benefited from ...”

“... Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott has a claim to be considered the great poet of the same experience. They share an acute sense of belonging to more than one culture and hence to none. The reference in the title poem to the Caribbean’s ‘history-orphaned islands’ is a motto for many other poems in ...”

“... The Shell Guide to the History of London might be more accurately described as the shell of a historical guide to selected architecture and works of art in London. The terms involved in such titles have long been subject to a process of inflation, as have the volumes themselves. For nearly three centuries there have been innumerable combinations of the words ‘guide’, ‘history’ and ‘London’ together with a great variety of adjectives, each product being claimed by publisher and author alike as the indispensable vade-mecum, mentor or companion for visitors to the metropolis or students of its history ...”

“... read a great deal, and made illustrations for Joyce’s Ulysses, which was banned and could only be read at the National Library. He lived for a while in a ‘weekender’ (a cottage in the bush) and tried to stow away on a ship to Britain. By the time he was 21 he had worked as cook in a hamburger bar, helped lead a ...”

“... nation’s doubt and anxiety, then it failed miserably: its pat conclusions (eventually undermined by the 1979 Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations) were ignored, spurned in favour of those 26 laden volumes and the jumble of confused and contradictory evidence they contain – the playground of the conspiracy junkie. Nicholas Branch, a pivotal ...”

“... was Wittgenstein’s objection to Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that the procedure might be impressive, but why did interpretation have to end just there, what was to stop it going on indefinitely? On Julian Barnes, who is so addicted to the business or game of interpretations, the question does not seem to weigh so heavily. We perhaps misunderstand ...”

“... match with memory and experience?’ This means that she has to consider the loss of confidence, by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present ...”

“... in two parts. The first, ‘The Poet as Heir’, investigates characteristic uses of allusion by major British poets of the 18th and 19th centuries: Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Burns, Byron, Keats and Tennyson. The second, ‘In the Company of Allusion’, is a collection of occasional essays on allusion in minor or contemporary poets, or on general topics ...”

“... Africa or Asia, but himself provides an account which gives all the agency to Europe. What is to be done? The answer I have attempted myself has been to study the internal dynamics of African, or Asian, societies in such detail that it is possible to discern their distinguishing features even under colonialism and capitalism. But it would take a long time to ...”

“... of Scrutiny had been very much himself and, after his departure, was discussed as visitors tend to be. A certain elderly member of the English Department even observed: ‘He seemed perfectly all right to me. I can’t think why everybody calls him “Queenie”.’ The gay life was more or less unguessed at by those we know ...”