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“... itself for language, which never really captures it and ultimately cheats the experience. We are always referring our experience to something else as in “this reminds me of ...” There’s a sense of hardly ever living in the present, and this kind of nostalgia comes through in the writing.’ Here Shepard is touching on the central alertness ...”

“... literary critics’ valorisation of tradition’. This phrase occurs towards the end of W.J. McCormack’s dissection of Anglo-Irishness as a literary and historical concept, Ascendancy and Tradition. ‘Valorise’, indeed, is a verb much favoured in this book, along with others like ‘energise’ and ‘traumatise’. There’s a word that might ...”

“... all culminating in ‘Commencement’, the graduation ceremonies for the Class of 1986. We were, to be sure, an interesting class, the first one to graduate in the Kennedy years, a transitional period between Eisenhower conservatism and the anti-Vietnam War militancy that traumatised Harvard and other universities in the late Sixties. In the 1960 ...”

“... as Bidault learned to his horror, was calmly assuming that Valeri, the Papal Nuncio and former dean of the Vichy diplomatic corps would remain in place under the new regime: he would merely be extending the ritual New Year greetings to de Gaulle rather than Pétain. Valeri was blackballed and had to be replaced by an angry Vatican with Mgr Roncalli (later ...”

“... magically returned, and he shouted for another, thinking: the thirteenth. Unlucky for some, but we’ll see how it turns out. He received the pint and drank a little more slowly, but half-way through it the temptation to be sick became a necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a ...”

“... he was 66, a suicide planned with the same elaborate care with which he staged his paintings. ‘We were surprised to learn that his suicide was so ritualistic,’ Robert Motherwell said. For me, and I imagine for many others then as now, Rothko just was his paintings – paintings that seemed, when we stood before them ...”

“... pantheon. But unlike such Oxford contemporaries as Trevor-Roper, Maurice Bowra or even John Sparrow, all of whom have been well served in recent biographies, Cobb was never a college head, and this may go some way to explaining his subsequent eclipse. It was a role for which he was epically unsuited, given his (very un-French) disdain for ...”

“... experience a jolt when they are told that Adam Smith was not an economist. Rather, as we know from his body of work and from the chance survival of lecture notes taken by his students, he was a moral philosopher and analyst of statecraft for whom The Wealth of Nations was only one – albeit crucial – component in a broader science of ...”

“... much Norman Lamont’s career in a nutshell). Later in the century, Richard FitzNeal, first as dean of Lincoln and latterly as bishop of London, continued in his day job in the church while moonlighting as treasurer ” for an apparently unbroken forty years. It’s as though Jim Callaghan were now preparing to leave 11 Downing Street after serving ...”

“... decidedly unglamorous living as vicar of Doncaster. The highest he was to reach in the Church was Dean of Llandaff. The secret of his puzzling resignation probably lies in a story told in the memoirs of John Addington Symonds, a pupil at Harrow at that time, which were not published till the 1960s. There, a simple tale of ...”

“... arguable that both the skill and the ideology of the modern Western soldier have been, shall we say, sharpened by years of frenetic and dedicated service in the box bedroom. Halo is basically the story of a super-soldier who is fighting a theocratic nightmare called the Covenant, with the person at the video console, if he is skilful enough, framed as ...”

“... problems – Galtieri’s junta decided to force the issue. The invasion started on 2 April. We know what the British government’s response to that was: the Task Force; ‘Rejoice!’ (Thatcher’s order to the nation when South Georgia was recaptured); Goose Green; and the eventual Argentinian surrender on 14 June. All this took Galtieri by ...”

“... who teaches at Duke University, which publishes Social Text, and a man widely regarded as the very dean of advanced (literary) ‘theory’, replied on the oped page of the New York Times. There, he used the phrase, or its cognates, 16 times in a few paragraphs. If a cancer cell did that to a human body, death would be immediate. Sokal has since been an ...”

“... authorship, death and readership – wrapped up in one neat package so intricately knotted that we can pick it up, feel its weight and then chuck it in the back of the drawer where it belongs. We might judge the final episode of Cold Lazarus an appropriate moment to draw a line under self-referential fiction, raise our ...”

“... And, amazingly, there it was: his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions: that this – this continuity – was the reality. Then I went to ...”