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“... The implicit refrain which underlies many of the chapters of Paradigms Lost is that OK, their fox has been shot, but it was never entirely their fox anyway, and there are, in any case, many other good animals out in the forest and, taking one thing with another, all you need do is fine-tune the rhetoric and carry on ...”

“... also preferable to those who don’t give a damn, and functionaries of the British system such as Robin Cook were instrumental in creating the International Criminal Court, an institution which lessens, even if it hardly removes, the legal wriggle room available to this country. A Very British Killing establishes a crucial historical point, all the same. The ...”

“... It is of course a picture of the rise of Christianity which has taken quite a beating recently. Robin Lane Fox has shown that early Christianity was really a very middle-class affair. Nietzsche dedicated Human All Too Human – admittedly in one of his spasmodic reactions against Schopenhauer – to Voltaire, saint of the ...”

“... in from Capri to preside over the spiritual life of the island: on his merry way to drinking and fox-trotting himself to death, he delighted in pederastic idylls with his Whale Cay choirboys.As the years wore on, Carstairs began to retreat more and more into reclusive eccentricity. In the Fifties, as her health broke down, she became increasingly unable to ...”

“... squarely at an audience conceived as wanting its close readings of ‘Pike’ and ‘The Thought-Fox’ leavened by details of Hughes’s ‘vigorous’ love-making, and likely to be impressed by pseudo-profound sentences such as ‘Hughes’s poetry was the history of his own soul,’ or would-be moving ones, such as the eight-word paragraph with which Bate ...”

“... he is helpless. But a little later Wistan gives a special signal (it’s like the cry of a forlorn fox) and his mare responds, passing in front of him and giving him a moment of cover. When he’s visible again, Wistan is standing exactly where he was but now has a sword in his hand. It’s all done with the slickness of a Hollywood special effect, and ...”

“... this is why idiosyncratic, marginal obsessions sometimes befog Mullin’s judgment, as with fox-hunting. The pledge in the 1997 manifesto to ban it drags on unlegislated into Labour’s second term. Finally, in November 2004, the government uses the Parliament Act to force through legislation which bans hunting with dogs. Mullin exults: ‘We have taken ...”

“... 1990s, blew away the anodyne output of the traditional TV broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC (Fox, the fourth network, was launched in 1986). A harbinger of the new mode was the late Garry Shandling’s faux-documentary comedy about a chat show, The Larry Sanders Show (1992-98), which he co-produced and co-wrote for HBO, and starred in as the eponymous ...”

“... Christians in the Roman Empire, implies an even-handed survey of religions, something rather like Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians, which divides more or less neatly in half. But although Hopkins includes chapters on the heathen and the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is the third group he is interested in: early Christianity ...”

“... It was surely rather cruel to tell him the truth. Drabble puts Walker, along with Calder and Robin Ironside, in the class of ‘self-destroyers’. Yet he, too, was a scholar of exceptional resource, and, unlike Calder, of achievement and repute – a musicologist of distinction, as profound a Dickensian as Wilson himself, the possibly more level-headed ...”

“... youngsters led by almost equally young men defecated in shell holes or, under fire, in their own fox holes, and could not wash properly for days on end, but could keep going in hopes of looting a ‘feather bed to sleep on in their dripping damp slit trenches’, or a German’s pig to slaughter and eat. Meanwhile, the enemy, who should have known that the ...”

“... of the Independent Labour Party, bent on expropriation of his own class, Percy Taylor took a Robin Hood view of politics. His party trick was to stand on his head, literally, for the benefit of his nephews and nieces, since they collected the money that cascaded out of his pockets. The watchful eye of his wife Connie meanwhile ensured that all benefited ...”

“... financial ordinance which my little company might unwittingly have committed. When the Governor (Robin Leigh-Pemberton) told me what the summons was about, I heard myself mumbling some priggish nonsense about being brought up to believe that if the government of the day asks you to do a job you do it if you can. The Governor, after thanking me, leaned ...”

“... Daniel A. Farber’s Beyond All Reason: the Radical Assault on Truth in American Law (1997); and Fox Nation v. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth by Mark Howard. I toss these books together to indicate how this digital age, which prides itself on its abundance and freedom of information, has become so ...”

“... Goose and the Mad March Hare’, if that tells you anything. Its conclusion – that Christopher Robin WILL kill himself and erotic potters WILL make obscene vases of their daughters, and everyone else will be swept away by the Great War – is stated so plainly by history that it is not particularly rewarding to work towards in fiction. (‘It was ...”