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“... Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers have fared less well: Chatham and Lord John ...”

“... found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David instead?’ David is my father’s brother. He still lives alone in the council house my grandmother died in. He used to hear ...”

“... so well (partly, perhaps, because of his own obsessive motivicism and thematicism), he was by no means insensitive to the orchestra, even though his first instrument was plainly the piano; the lessons learnt from Stravinsky and Copland play their part, but except for certain concertante-piano textures there is no Bernstein ‘sound’ apart from that ...”

“... a substantially different novel. But the novel we now have, the novel we have always had, is by no means easy to interpret or even to describe. In D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World, Kinkead-Weekes suggests a reading against the grain when he points out that The Rainbow could be described as a historical novel: a novel concerned, not with the travails of the ...”

“... lower-middle-class provincial boy with commonplace social aspirations, but with very uncommonplace means of fulfilling them: as he made music, so music made him. True. But the implications of this go largely unexplored. By conquering the oratorio, the symphony and the concerto, Elgar also conquered the court, the country and the Establishment. Music was the ...”

“... observed. ‘Well, he’s left school, hasn’t he?’ demanded my father. ‘ “School-leaver” means some no-hope fifteen-year-old from a secondary modern,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a euphemism.’ She was a well-educated woman, my mother. ‘Pays like a euphemism, too,’ she added. Years of marriage to my father had imparted a Yiddish edge to her ...”

“... question implicit in such predictions: how in practice would the House of Windsor be ended? One means would be Parliamentary legislation abolishing the monarchy: this is not a realistic possibility. Another is that the crowds rise up, storm Buckingham Palace, and bear its occupants off to the guillotine: even in the unhappy and feverish week between ...”

“... more clothing and paid more attention to fashion. Canny silk producers drove this development by means of advertising and what amounted to market research: monitoring consumer taste and putting out brightly coloured new patterns each year. Demand drove up prices – and profits – allowing producers to take even more risks. Sewell, in Marxian ...”

“... Kant and Rawls imply that whatever the answer, it will in the end be a question of geography. Size means extent, and the surface of the earth has natural and social contours which limit the extent of any putative state, no matter how well organised or well intentioned. Something more than a walled city, something less than the globe, a viable state in the ...”

“... especially if it takes a literary turn – avoid consumption altogether. Although Brown is by no means the first to argue that literature can ‘redeem’ the material world from commodification, he does so engagingly, with ingenuity, tact and an admirable breadth of reference. His first move is to turn the tables on Marx’s table-turning. The table which ...”

“... In other words they learn from their mistakes, without stopping to wonder what it really means to learn or to make a mistake. It is amazing how much can be accomplished by machines that operate like this. It’s as though they were just waiting to be told that they should try doing it their way, not ours. The prince of this brave new world – and ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”

“... The programme of the moderate nationalists, he believes, can only be fulfilled by the most extreme means. This is what makes Kahane ideologically dangerous: he can claim that his policies only represent the logical extension of generally accepted nationalist principles – such as, in the case of Israel, the need for a Jewish majority. The extent of Kahane’s ...”

“... in a South American language, and other events entirely inexplicable except by supernatural means. But the sceptics were unconvinced. And they were right. The day after the prioress testified against Grandier, she condemned herself (she dressed in a shirt, with a rope around her neck and a candle in her hand, and stood in a public place, mimicking the ...”

“... for a pee, and contemplating all the other things he can do on his own, ‘not one’ of which ‘means “work”’. Larkin, that ‘nine to five man who had seen poetry’, needed his ‘toad, work’ to spare him the terrors of the blank page, especially in the years after ‘Aubade’, when blank is what the page remained, no matter how long he stared at ...”