“... in itself ... the political press lost its bearings, its justification and whatever efficacy it may have had.’ Today there is political journalism without party, which Koss compares to ‘Christianity without dogma’. Under the old party managers who created the political press, a journalist was expected to share the views of his employer, but there was ...”

“... that ‘it is one of the few Victorian attempts at making the place more delightful. Poor as it may be thought, it represents its time.’ He insisted that wall paintings which were fading be recorded, rather than restored, and on his departure from the post of Surveyor of the Fabric wrote: ‘The systematic cleaning of the structure and monuments ... has ...”

“... it is not just another facet of reality, however clamorous and incorrigible that reality may sometimes feel. Miss Didion, however, has come out. She stands revealed, in The White Album, as a human being who has managed to gouge another book out of herself, rather than as a writer who gets her living done on the side, or between the lines. The result ...”

“... Adolf Hitler or to die for him. The personality of the Führer had me totally in its spell.’ It may seem obvious that a barrage of propaganda played an important part in helping the Nazis to reach parts of the electorate the other parties failed to reach (such as first-time voters). But there are also good grounds for scepticism about the broader potency of ...”

“... become ‘things’: the attempt to remove a terminological distinction between men and women may turn both into an object, as when ‘chairman’ and ‘chairwoman’ are replaced by ‘chair’. Such phenomena are part of the rough-and-tumble of linguistic change and a fair price to pay for legitimate social objectives. My concern is not with the fact ...”

“... with my mother,’ he said in an interview. And then added: ‘But I absolutely reject that.’ It may be that ‘difficult women’ are a luxury that only homosexuals can afford in their lives. But if there is some truth in this (men who have to live with women, if they have any sense, must prefer them to be easy-going), there is none in its ...”

“... and his donning an old brown robe to sit at his desk at dusk, like Balzac. Be that as it may, El Pais’s editorial page is thus made doubly noble by the new Nobel novelist. Recently a letter not to but from the Editor praised the writer’s exemplary habits of punctuality, order and cleanliness in terms so compelling they could force an untidy ...”

“... has to be shot, and she asks that Erick should despatch her. This is the coup de grâce. The plot may sound like an opera summary, but there are no arias. Erick tersely explains his rejection of the girl: ‘I was not prepared to regard Conrad as a brother-in-law. One does not drop a friend of 20 years’ standing, though radiantly young, for a shabby ...”

“... de I’Homme and Musée Guimet have nourished modern artists as nowhere else. All colonisation may be barbaric, but some ends of empire are more civilised than others. As you watch Yoshi Oida barking and grunting at his archery disciples with wonderful contained authority, you are reminded not only of a Zen master test but also of a Keystone Cops ...”

“... Mrs Thatcher’s desire to rebuild the British future in the image of Reaganite capitalist America may have impressed Brian Walden, and it has certainly depressed the Trade Union movement no end: but its impact on managerial behaviour is harder to detect. Nor is there much reason to expect anything else: there are many more successful economies in the world ...”

“... back her ancestral estate of Marchbank. A similar linguistic clue suggests that Miss Marjoribanks may also have been acknowledged by a very different writer. Throughout the 1920s E.F. Benson – whose brother had lamented the decline of Mrs Oliphant’s sons – published a series of very successful novels in which a childless woman, confident of her own ...”

“... any social explosion great enough to change people’s lives ever can be. Paradoxical though it may seem, the lasting importance of the Affair was not all that much to do with Alfred Dreyfus, who, after his release, fought well in the war and then lived a quiet and unremarkable life until his death in 1935. Jean-Denis Bredin has provided us with what will ...”

“... deserving and less fortunate than I. They do not have my ‘considerable wealth’. Some of them may have an odd notion of what being a working writer involves. They imagine it as being one continuous sabbatical, with all expenses paid from some inexhaustible source and with leisure to research and write all the books one had ever imagined – while, of ...”

“... than the character, causes and implications of contemporary disputes, is the main subject. It may well be that the historical understanding thus arrived at will illuminate contemporary disputes, but there can be no assurance of this.Another approach is to assume that we know what the ‘crisis’ is and proceed to ask about its causes and prospects. This ...”

“... wine. This instruction survived through 1559, and then, significantly, disappeared in 1662. That may be a remarkably brutal transformation, but Cranmer could be very nuanced in the language he used to realign the nature of this drama, which so divided Christians. He was unhappily conscious in 1549 that his traditionalist colleagues in the House of Lords ...”