“... and learning, it is unlikely that anyone could have done it much better. Whatever the Oxford brand signifies, it is neither academic nor geographical. The chairs occupied by the authors of the final phase are situated in Cambridge, Otago, Keele, London, Middlesex and Cardiff. The doyen of them, William Cornish, has a ...”

“... of the News of the World, then edited by Coulson, intercepted the voicemail messages of Princes William and Harry. Goodman was arrested, and the police found 15 confidential palace phone books at his house in Putney. They also found five thousand names mentioned in 11,000 pages of handwritten notes at the home and in the office of Glenn Mulcaire, the ...”

“... with which Party believes Liberalism itself was inextricably intertwined. Onto this scene erupted William Ewart Gladstone. The trouble with Gladstone, according to Parry, was that, as a former Conservative, he understood neither the values nor the governing style which the Whigs had developed. He also suffered from other disadvantages. For one thing, his ...”

“... have become, too much aware of what might theoretically be made of contemporary social situations. William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey should have been a very good novel but failed to be, because the author gave up his own involuntary and unconscious literary personality in favour of a plot that must have looked absolutely right – too right – for this ...”

“... an impression of newness by means of gimmickry. Enderby is a portrait of the artist, with his own brand of self-indulgence concealed as satire. Burgess’s admiration for Joyce was whole-hearted: Joyce was his lodestar; but Joyce is a writer whose inspiration can only lead to pastiche, and to an ultimately toppling tower of verbal invention. The depths of ...”

“... until the Forties. They were aided by films (and in the Forties and Fifties a TV series) starring William Boyd – a star who in the geriatric last stages of his career had barely a hop left in him. At the crucial stage of Zane Grey’s career, 1905-8, Lina took charge as her husband’s literary agent, editor and financial patron. Using his wife’s ...”

“... enough?’ After one day, only the hookers remained, except for one the abusive bastard tried to brand with his Cohiba. The blacks went back to Watts, the Indians to the reservation. Leaving me to be the sole whipping-boy of the man who may have held a Harvard degree, but was a disgrace to it, cruder and meaner . . . than any of the street mobsters that Mr ...”

“... circulated, or any of nature’s other more minor confidences uncovered by the likes of Darwin or William Harvey. To learn the secret of life is to figure out that DNA has a double-helical structure. And while Perutz did not make that discovery, he did run the Cambridge research unit in which the most notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place ...”

“... Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological quality. This brand of liberty is not in principle opposed to authority, not least because without its minatory presence it would have nothing to grumble about. Even so, it keeps a wary eye on the potential insolence of power. It is peaceable but nonconformist. English freedom ...”

“... Representatives, which means that the often mentioned potential for Trump to poison the national brand is grossly exaggerated. The source of Republican national power is Republican local power, which will be hard to shake until after the 2020 census, no matter how badly they behave. In Wisconsin, the Republican trifecta has allowed the party over the last ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... on its reserves in the North Sea and Alaska. Thatcher, sensitive to the danger of a famous British brand being swallowed up in a hostile takeover, urged BP to move aggressively into the cash-strapped Soviet Union. ‘Start some investment rolling,’ she told Browne, who was then the managing director of BP’s Exploration and Production division. He ordered ...”

“... of subliterates and kids, has produced its own geniuses, not all of whom were Disney prodigies of brand creation and marketing. Chester Gould, the hard-boiled newsman responsible for the harsh dynamism of the long-running detective strip Dick Tracy, is one. George Herriman, inventor of the sweet, enigmatic Krazy Kat, a strip that refined a single situation ...”

“... and it is not hard to find them dancing on its open grave. Others beside Peregrine Worsthorne and William Rees-Mogg are seeking to write off whole branches of political thought as a proven failure. The ground, it would seem, is left bare of anyone to the left of Margaret Thatcher; and the fact that she has at this very moment created so much trouble for ...”

“... of empty space. Nothing in the poem allows the thought that there is anything outside it – no brand-names or politicians – and the poem is characteristically situated at the very edge of land: as it were, at the limit of reference and experience and paraphrase. There is no such exclusion on time – there is in Montale’s first poems, which often end ...”