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“... aimed at the popular audience Coupland has always nurtured. Yet their reverent tone and persistent Christian echoes – baptism, the Last Day, the Garden of Eden – make a deeper claim. Coupland seems to be serious about his mysticism, in a shy sort of way. He shares the old worry at having to use words to assert the value of wordlessness, at the deadening ...”

“... and so on. ‘The old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles,’ John Colville observed. Despite the book’s title, he was anything but ‘the inevitable prime minister’. It isn’t just a matter of his undoubted conservatism on the matters listed above. After Oxford he had started to train as a lawyer but got distracted by ...”

“... same year, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum compared the Biafrans’ plight to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. John Lennon returned his MBE as a protest against the UK’s support of the federal government. Martin Amis, then a university student, was shocked to encounter ‘an incredible reactionary … who supports Nigeria against Biafra’; the same person, it turned ...”

“... contribution, however, is Jean-Marie Mayeur’s essay on ‘De Gaulle as Politician and Christian’, for the whole point about de Gaulle was that, although he came from the classic conservative stables of the Army and Catholicism, he was not an ordinary clerical or military conservative. Most clerics supported Vichy, which he opposed; he included ...”

“... race, they have endured a persecution the records of which will for ever remain a reproach to the Christian nations of Europe. Ireland has no share in this black record. Our country has this proud distinction – freely acknowledged by Jewish writers – of never having resorted to this un-Christian and barbarous treatment ...”

“... slaves have souls to save, so do their masters; each is impeding the other in this endeavour. The Christian religion is a subversive force, or so the masters fear; the slaves start to believe that everyone is equal in the sight of God. It persuades them that ‘one thing is right and another thing wrong’ – whereas properly speaking, they should surrender ...”

“... as a nationalist alternative. Nothing exemplified the new political culture more tellingly than John McGrath’s play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), which the 7:84 theatre company took on tour round Scotland. The play itself was impeccably socialist; but audiences were more alert to its unintended nationalist message. Indeed, there ...”

“... as she and we are made to read ‘A Sermon’ in which he abstracts the lessons of her life into Christian orthodoxy. It does not even have the strange and mad elements of Cecilia, in which London is a genuinely frightening and violent place. The ‘female difficulties’ that we can sense in her letters – the awkward conversations at balls, the uncertain ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given ...”

“... movement. Cheyette traces the Disraelian influence on the ‘imperial Gothic’ fiction of John Buchan and, more controversially, borrows August Bebel’s phrase ‘the socialism of fools’ as a blanket term for the ideas of Shaw and Wells. Bebel’s concern was to attack the kind of socialism, typified in a British context by H.M. Hyndman, which ...”

“... most of whom she quickly established a remarkably lively and gossipy relationship. Diana Athill, John Guest, Terence Kilmartin, and many others, were recipients of chat, grumbles, doubts, jokes, questions, japes – often with cross-references to each other: if one editor disapproved of a new poem, she told you, and shot it in your direction, thus giving you ...”

“... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When ...”

“... the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack. Geoffrey Robertson has set out to rescue him from the enormous disregard of posterity, and from ...”

“... tradition of cruelty every bit as powerful and a thousand times more ancient than the Judaeo-Christian ethic.’ If anything other than boredom took Clark into politics, it was surely a ‘man of destiny’ fixation. ‘What does the future hold for me? How far will I go?’ But he also fears that this moment may have passed. Several entries here are ...”