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“... at stake in sanity,’ Phillips says, ‘is whether we can be at home in the world,’ and he is wise enough, sane enough, to know that we don’t have to succeed in this enterprise to make it worth attempting. ‘It would be sane now to work out how we have become the only animals who can’t bear themselves; and how, if at all, we might become the animals ...”

“... If you took​ only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material, chronicles passages of life that would test the most resilient cheerfulness. Coming through Slaughter (1976) is loosely based on the tragic life of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden, who died in an asylum in New Orleans ...”

“... exposed as a social impostor – his daughter went to the sister school of the one attended by Michael Portillo – were as much about class as they were about race. It’s a pity, therefore, that the unifying ‘we’ with which the authors underscore their book prevents the potentially divisive issue of class from being fully explored. How much does an ...”

“... a hair’s breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ...”

“... a German athlete just as the Nazis are invading Czechoslovakia – but sometimes he says something wise or prescient, and whenever he is complimented for this, he replies, ‘modestly’: ‘I served the Emperor of Ethiopia.’ And there is Milos Hrma, the young, timid railway signalman in Hrabal’s most famous novel, Closely Observed Trains. When he ...”

“... In a Foreword to this very substantial book Michael Ffinch says that G.K. Chesterton ‘was above all things a great champion of Liberty’. He goes on: ‘This being so, it has often come as a surprise that in religion Chesterton should have moved away from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood towards Catholicism ...”

“... such trove? I decided, using a polite intermediary, to inflict it on Mr Laurence himself. But he, wise man, refused to be encumbered with such help. In his introduction to this bibliography Mr Laurence likens himself to Childe Roland who ‘to the dark tower came’. It is difficult to know precisely what to make of this. Are we to deduce that, like Edgar, he ...”

“... plays when old, essays and memoirs of various stripes all along. By turns, polemical, mild, droll, wise, ironic. (None of these, I think, have appeared in English, which, true to form, is interested only in echt novel novels. Danish novels.) He summarises himself – early, but it remained true: ‘I have pursued writing since my childhood and have had only ...”

“... most comprehensive theory of civic society written in English since Locke’. ‘In English’ is wise: it excludes Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Hegel, Marx and Weber. The claim remains bizarre: Locke did not produce a theory of civil society, comprehensive or otherwise, but an account of our obligations to government or the state. The concept of civil ...”

“... more demotically awkward, more (the word presented itself) Wordsworthian. Perhaps I’m being wise after the event: at any rate the event –this collection of nine demanding and tough-minded essays –bears me out. Wordsworth is its presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and ...”

“... assertion of the British national interest since the Second World War and an excellent example of wise state intervention’ – would gain general assent except in the case of the section preoccupied (as he is not) with the hazards of nuclear power. He talks of integrated transport and energy policies as though he means it. He can see the argument for some ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... irresistible, when everything essential to that theatre actually lies beyond archaeology. As Michael Hattaway reminds us in his eloquent new study of Elizabethan Popular Theatre, the Rose, the Curtain, the Globe and the rest did not define the drama that they housed. Far more important than the ‘wooden O’ and ‘cockpit’ were those shared attitudes ...”

“... in the future. ‘If not Arizona, then a land not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.’ A pause. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah.’ ‘Things have changed,’ one of the hoodlums says in Fargo, when a little kidnapping has escalated into triple murder: a policeman blown away because ...”

“... but ultimately unappealing men. In Hollywood, she transformed herself into a sassy and worldly-wise ‘broad’ (her own word), someone who would inquire of an English actor asking for a date: ‘Do you eat pussy?’ Around the same time she said to the Brazilian lyricist Vinicius de Moraes: ‘Yes I am very beautiful, but morally, I stink.’ She was ...”