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“... Sénancour’s ‘inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness’. Those words of Matthew Arnold, half yearning and half disapproving, imply the curious relation between romantic swimming as balm and symbol of the death-wish, and public school swimming as it might be called – a bracing and brutal baptism to banish mollycoddling and drive morbid ...”

“... At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his British audience: congregations of the educated Sipping wine, attentive between courses – See the applause fluttering from their white hands Like so many messy table napkins ...”

“... Africa and Asia don’t seem quite as bad. The perplexingly affirmative work of Niall Ferguson and David Armitage scants, if it doesn’t actually trivialise, the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims. More is said now about the modernising advantages the empires brought, and about the security and order they maintained. There is far ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says ...”

“... knew he could do, except to try to do them at a continuous, towering level. It led, as we learn in Arnold Rampersad’s new biography, to endless perfectionism in smaller and smaller publications (‘perfectionism that was clogging his arteries as a writer’, Rampersad says), and rounds of admired speeches given on ever larger stages (up to various arts ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... Arabs were not allowed to settle or even work on land owned by the Jewish National Fund: in 1931 Arnold Toynbee noted that ‘all the Palestinian land which is purchased by Jewish funds is becoming ... an exclusive preserve for the Jews.’ However, all this is trivial misrepresentation in comparison with the author’s basic error.The immigrant ...”

“... was denied such a thoughtful conclusion, though there were Regular Army types like the snarling Arnold Wilson, a sort of Cheltenham Man, who would have been delighted to afford it him. Instead, his post-conflict life was the strange half-world of Shaw and Ross, a couple of flaunted incognitos worn during his days as a ranker. They have fascinated posterity ...”

“... an opportunity to remark that he himself always bore the stigmata of an underclass. According to David Garnett, his hair was ‘of a colour, and grew in a particular way, which I have never seen except in English working men ... incredibly plebeian, mongrel and underbred ... He was the type of the plumber’s mate who goes back to fetch the tools ... the ...”

“... the Museum of Rouen to inspire him when he was writing the story called ‘Un Coeur Simple’. David Hockney produced an etching to illustrate that story, and it is reproduced on the dust-cover of Julian Barnes’s novel. The narrator is interested – in an untidy, stream-of-consciousness way – in the significance of that parrot, appearing to the old ...”

“... a very few months of coming to London he had done the same for Lloyd George, so that by 1921, as Arnold Bennett said, his cuddly, bemused Prime Minister, irresponsible but irrepressible, had already ousted all previous images of Lloyd George. One of Low’s earliest and greatest inventions during his time on the Star was the two-headed Coalition Ass, Lloyd ...”

“... of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame as a critic, wrote that ‘it took you by the scruff of the neck and shook you,’ a quick reprint at seven-and-six was ordered. Not even Joynson-Hicks, the Home Secretary, would have dared to argue with Bennett. One ...”

“... Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David Garnett, simply couldn’t manage the world of journalistic deadlines. Today, leftish journals face an ever-widening gulf between the concerns of ‘cultural politics’ and the day-to-day agenda of professional politicians, which remains overwhelmingly ...”

“... this way of thinking. Fire and brimstone evangelists like Carlyle, agonised agnostics like Matthew Arnold, Arts and Crafts socialists like Ruskin and Morris, and vegetarian Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs accused capitalism of betraying what was best for all by bringing out the worst in each. In Victorian fiction its heroes are few, and overshadowed by its ...”

“... secret league of kindred spirits,’ like – he might have added – the Davidsbund, or League of David, which he had portrayed in his own early piano works in the guise of an alliance against the untalented, anti-progressive Philistines. The NGS, precisely, was a Davidsbund. Schumann would not have tolerated the exclusion of Brahms, and he would have been ...”