“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... by shouts from his bedroom to make him a cup of tea; she was free to immerse herself in reading the great Russian novels and writing a book of her own, a series of sardonic brief lives of her husband’s brothers and their spouses. She had as many visitors and invitations as she could wish, because she was immensely popular – and with people of ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... whirl, it didn’t seem to matter that he wasn’t settling down. He was enjoying himself, and reading a lot and making friends. In biographies of the period, a group photograph of famous faces will look out at us, and there will be a round cheery figure behind horn-rimmed glasses, and the caption, ‘Unidentified’. Esmond splashed out on the ...”

“... marriage in 1950 hardly helped his self-confidence, and Evans’s account of it makes for painful reading. Hobsbawm had married Muriel Seaman, a fellow communist he had met at the LSE. He knew she was ‘not ideal’ but had ‘got used to her’; grading as usual, he hoped she’d ‘soon be very good’. Fatally, he tried to turn her into an intellectual ...”

“... what they regard as his infatuation with the upper classes. Ever since J.B. Priestley, after reading A Handful of Dust, gave him the patronising advice to ‘leave the world of society light-weights’, critics have lamented his snobbery. Wodehouse never asked us to take the Drones Club seriously. Why then should we admire the members of Brats? Many ...”

“... of the present is an unproductive use of leisure time – since what we’re talking about here is reading for pleasure. But the fact is that Allingham and Sayers, both better writers than Christie, are more likely to break the containment field of the detective genre, in ways that end up distracting you or putting you off their books. I came across another ...”

“... far than Los Angeles in the past and Athens in the future as a venue for the Olympics,’ stated Peter Warren, Lee Valley’s head of corporate marketing. Lee Valley’s Strategic Business Plan (2000-10) is preparing the ground for change and innovation. ‘The Leisure Centre is an ageing building over 25 years old and the whole complex is subject to ...”

“... would know what it was to engage with them and the kind of problem Frege was trying to solve. From reading Sluga’s book, he would gain only the haziest impression of Frege’s thought, and would miss entirely any feel for what it is like to try to grapple with those problems with the rigour and exactitude for which Frege is celebrated but for which Sluga ...”

“... for it: wit, taste, social grace, quickness with languages. She read books. He seldom mentions reading anything but plays and newspapers. The one thing he had of his own which she could not match was his talent. To undo his fraud and become a real hero for her, he made himself a great actor. That was what drove them apart. On the most basic level, he tells ...”

“... not only lent status to the Party; they also helped to radicalise it. There had been much reading in jail – everything from Rousseau to Marx to Foucault. Politically aware and streetwise, the new activists threw themselves into a re-organisation of the Party at every level. They campaigned about prison conditions, security issues, the ...”

“... sensitive issue of childcare decision-making in Scotland and upheld the convicted drugs offender Peter Welch’s claim that the confiscation order of £59,914 imposed on him violated his rights under the Convention. In March 1994 the AlFayed brothers took a legal team of six to argue (unsuccessfully) that the DTI report into the House of Fraser had infringed ...”

“... stretched out naked on her bed upstairs during a bibulous evening with the Styrons, Nichols, Peter Matthiessen and the rest, Mahoney comments – with the bizarre know-nothingism of the amnesiac – that her ‘nipples were the size of Oreos’. This culminating image of the post-prandial, brown-nippled Hellman – comatose, alone, exposed and snuffly ...”

“... the first in August 1597, the second two in 1598 (‘the only instance except that of Pericles’, Peter Ure has observed, ‘of a Shakespearean quarto going into two editions in the same year’). The success of a play in print did not necessarily betoken success on the stage. Even so it would be surprising to find a member of Shakespeare’s company speaking ...”

“... to the support network naturally available to ‘a public school man’. It would be an obtuse reading to see in this some sort of criticism on Waugh’s part of a corrupt social order: the precondition of the comedy is an ostentatious refusal to engage in such humdrum ethical judgment. Grimes is scandalous but he has an indefatigableness which, in the ...”