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“... US and its allies to prepare for the use of decisive force. Many Americans were also confounded by her demise. President Bush was in Saudi Arabia rallying the troops when the news broke of Thatcher’s fall. He called her at once to express his deep sympathy and his mild sense of bemusement. ‘It was quite emotional for him,’ his press secretary Marlin ...”

“... is at last possible to survey his oeuvre as a whole: two volumes of Complete Poems were published by Martin Brian and O’Keeffe in 1978, and Penguin, in keeping with their best traditions, have risked issuing them in paperback. And it is coming to seem that the fault lay as much with the narrow criteria of the critics as with the ambitions of MacDiarmid’s ...”

“... My favourite memory of Roy Jenkins dates from a golden July evening during the Warrington by-election. He is standing in the front garden of a council house, deep in conversation with an elderly Labour housewife, for whose support he is canvassing. Stooping slightly, and with a courtly gravitas that would not have seemed out of place at a European Summit, he is explaining why the ‘fluctooations’ which have characterised British economic policy for the last ten years have done so much damage to our international credit ...”

“... predecessors, he is effectively without a job until the throne becomes vacant – which may not be until well into the next century. Meanwhile there is no longer an empire to provide him with the appropriate apprenticeship of a proconsular posting, and he is understandably eager to do more than accompany his wife on her shopping trips. But while his ...”

“... the writing need only offer a clue to the presence. Paul de Man said enough memorable things to be quoted like scripture by the susceptible, and one of the things he said was about quotation: Citer, c’est penser. It is fair to conclude that in his last years he was a guru. The effects can ...”

“... leanings unblinkingly remarked that modern music, like socialism, democracy and the BBC, might be among the luxuries which the European middle classes would soon have to live without. Six or seven years ago, only Alfred Jarry’s immortal King Ubu could have entertained the idea of the Polish State Symphony Orchestra touring 13 English towns and cities ...”

“... away. His childhood and schooldays had been lonely and unhappy, and they were made harder to bear by his distant mother, his disappointed father, and his more robust and much-preferred sister. He had married a woman renowned for her beauty rather than her brains, largely because he had been told it was his duty to do so. ...”

“... and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water’. By then he had dinted his way through eighty feet of rock, working alone from dawn till dark. When he was overcome with choke-damp at the start of work one day, he was hauled up unconscious – and resumed after a day or two once water had been thrown down the ...”

“... Modernism must be reckoned one of the lengthiest and most strenuous campaigns ever undertaken in the name of literature. Acutely conscious at once of the burden of the past – the intimidating totality of what had already been written – and of the present’s lightness, its free and easy way with burdens, its failure to be intimidated, the Modernist did not propose to carry on as before ...”

“... like all such devices, ought to maintain constancy. But it is also part of nature and so it may be affected by the kind of inconstancy that it often claims to detect in the other part which it measures. Wittgenstein in some of his later work was concerned with a fundamental form of this problem. Do the meanings of our ...”

“... to say anything entirely erroneous. Whatever is written about a town so vast and varied, whether by city residents, provincial visitors or foreign observers, is likely to be at least and at best partially valid, which may explain why the literature on London is so lush. By the late 18th ...”

“... to admit anything impalpable could push philosophers to such an extreme, but the refusal would be understandable if it were the sole way of rescuing the mind from the lofty isolation of Cartesianism. There must be some other way, and Brian O’Shaughnessy’s book is the record of a search for one. As its title ...”

“... gushed from the architectural presses, pouring praise on Lutyens and his works. Written primarily by a younger generation of architects and architectural historians, they emphatically reinstate the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in ...”

“... literature explaining his vagarious development, and the best study so far is a joint effort by two Berkeley scholars, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher, and Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist. Foucault himself lends credence to the Dreyfus/Rabinow interpretation by allowing them to include some of his recent unpublished ...”

“... The Road to Utopia was trodden by many star-struck pilgrims before Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour made their celluloid expedition there in the 1940s. Sir Thomas More, who first wrote of the place, lost his head completely, for non-Utopian reasons, and since then a succession of charismatic cranks, frenzied philosophers and visionary vegetarians have aspired to realise heaven upon earth while more usually anticipating hell ...”