“... Keith Sinclair, the leading New Zealand historian of the middle and later 20th century, was, like William Pember Reeves and J.C. Beaglehole before him, a man of the Left and saw his theme as the growth of a settler nationalism founded on social-democratic principles; but Belich writes after the appearance of works bearing such titles as The Ideal Society and ...”

“... in the shell itself. This is what the Disney Corporation Inc. had done to all the legends: Snow White, Pinocchio, even Huckleberry Finn.’ So much for the Magic Kingdom. In Australia, the heroine encounters the opposition of entrenched conservatism, which she combats in a healthy spirit of give and take. On her return, the deluge has fallen on ...”

“... girl in the red coat who is first seen in the ghetto, and later heaped onto a pile of black and white corpses. The significance of the moment is lost on Richard and his companion, who are characteristically preoccupied with the technique by which the red coat was created. ‘Do you reckon they painted it on the film with a brush?’ … ‘No way. They ...”

“... and vegetables outside on the pavements. A yard from me, the sun shines on the bald head and crisp white hair of a former terrorist who committed a particularly savage double murder in the Seventies. I watch him smiling and talking to various people who pass by. A big camper van swings into the side street. The party activist beside me asks have I read Gitta ...”

“... shooting to the stars’. In moments of rapture, he echoes the post-war rhetoric of Henry Luce and William Langer with his paeans to American righteousness and mission. The United States, he says, is a ‘chosen place’, ‘a city on a hill’, ‘the last best hope of man on earth’. The shocks and disillusionments of the last twenty years, his message ...”

“... of the Oxford family of dictionaries behind its recommendations.’ There it is in black and white – the appeal to authority. Buy our product: no other is guaranteed genuine. The paradoxical (and some might say shameful) aspect of such appeals to authority is that they run flagrantly counter to the basic principles on which modern lexicography was ...”

“... essays. Out of the window – if these experts are right – goes Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel ...”

“... is that a responsible and formally coherent account, much influenced by authorities as diverse as William Empson and Julian Pitt-Rivers, seems not to be powerful. I hope this can be said without being taken as part of some (Tom) Pauline conspiracy of Irish bull merchants. It is not at first sight a ‘political’ problem, since one of the things that ...”

“... a single sentence, sounding perhaps a little less fractious than it looked all alone on that white sheet of typing paper and inscribed above the signature in his tiny, measured hand. What I’d written about Fidelman and The Fixer, he informed me, ‘is your problem, not mine’. I wrote right back to tell him that in time, he might come to see that by ...”

“... to church bells, the cries of children playing outside, or the purring of a large, fat black and white cat? One sound is as likely and evocative as another, if you must import sound at all into a work which – unlike Picasso’s Guernica, or Edvard Munch’s The Scream – offers no tangible encouragement to the viewer to supply it. But at least the Vermeer ...”

“... done had he been in love with her! The other man was one who had engaged Stead as his secretary. William Blech – Bill Blake as he was to become – was a New York Jew, autodidact, intellectual, Marxist, and investments manager of a grain firm then operating out of London. When Blake learned, from a disdainful remark of Duncan’s, that his secretary ...”

“... He had inherited a family tradition of populist politics suffused with unabashed religiosity. William Wedgwood Benn had started as a Congregationalist and a Liberal: at 28 the youngest MP in the 1906 Parliament (whereas his own father had had to wait for a seat until he was 42). ‘Now Anthony has been chosen at the age of 25, so the family seems to be ...”

“... derived from a political satire. Malcolm provides a convincing refutation of the more sentimental, William Morris-like take on Bakhtin, which is determined to find the triumphant wisdom of the collective folk-body in the pedantic undergraduate humour of a monkish élite, offering instead what might be called a trickle-down theory of nonsense, but his account ...”

“... the 18th and 19th centuries, Pericles sank to the bottom of the sea. ‘Not much to our taste,’ William Hazlitt wrote in the Edinburgh Review in 1816, and ‘not like Shakespear’. We tend now to call Pericles a late work but Dryden thought its weaknesses signalled an early play, even a kind of apprentice piece. ‘A slender poet must have time to ...”

“... maypole, topped by deer antlers. A lawyer called Thomas Morton became the local Lord of Misrule. William Bradford, the governor of the colony, viewed this revival of the ancient Bacchanalia with horror. Armed men arrested Morton, who was sent back to England, and the maypole was chopped down the following year.It isn’t surprising that many New Englanders ...”