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“... like his name sounded, describing the head of the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC), Sir Frank Kearton, as ‘an inside guy at the skunk works’. Unfortunately, Harvie is an intellectual magpie and his book is irritatingly, or rather maddeningly, written, a series of digressions about every subject under the sun. He cannot bear, for example, to ...”

“... anguished charge into a cul-de-sac. There is a very real sadness to this, but it is better to be frank. In the new, post-Communist world of the 1990s the Left has much hard thinking to do – about its own roots and identity as well as about where it goes from here. The inspiration that can be gained from a backward look to the heroes of the Sixties has now ...”

“... myth – one we can still half assent to while half persuaded by the black, reductive alternative. Frank Kermode, while studying the mythopoeic patterns of The Spire, is surely right about the importance for that novel of a particular place, Salisbury, and a particular trade: ‘I don’t know exactly where he got the facts about the mason’s ...”

“... Among the faithful is Danny Kruger, the MP for Devizes, a former political secretary to Boris Johnson, leader-writer at the Daily Telegraph and co-founder (with Miriam Cates) of the New Social Covenant Unit, a right-wing think tank. Ahead of NatCon, Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that ...”

“... ever likely to fall on the matter of Tibet, for reasons which become clear from a reading of Sandy Johnson’s work. She presents a remarkable picture of a diaspora driven from its homeland whom one might expect to become the Parsees of the next millennium, using the close-knit ties of religious distinctiveness to concentrate on economic survival. Instead, we ...”

“... superannuated movie stars can be seen on American TV promoting adult diapers, but in 1997 when Johnson & Johnson went looking for a celebrity spokesmodel for Stayfree, its new line of menstrual pad, it had a hard time finding anyone willing to be identified with the product. Even the Spice Girls turned them down – so ...”

“... airplane engines and turbines, and the huge workshops with their avant-garde design, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax HQ in Racine, Wisconsin. A question that recurs at every turn in Freeman’s long story is whether workers’ suffering in the early years of industrialisation was really necessary. This ...”

“... the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... When Samuel Johnson, travelling in the Highlands with James Boswell, reaches Loch Ness, he is so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the landscape that the heavy order of his prose is briefly disarrayed. On his right, there are high and steep rocks, and on his left deep water laps against the bank in ‘gentle agitation ...”

“... Dryden’s as much as Romantic ‘imagination’ differed from Augustan ‘wit’. But here is Dr Johnson: ‘to write con amore … was … no part of his character.’ Verse starved of parental love may well have problems attracting affection later. T.S. Eliot took a charitable interest in the case in 1921, but his contribution is rather reminiscent of Mr ...”

“... Lilac Princess at school, millionaire biographer of Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, looks not all that different from her current subject. There is the same bright, taut face which a good surgical lift always ensures, the same immaculately-dyed and coiffeured hair, the same fixed smile exhibiting the kind of teeth that only an ...”

“... lunar nowherelands. In 1681 Charles Cotton dismissed them as ‘Nature’s pudenda’; in 1775 Dr Johnson was ‘astonished and repelled’ by their ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ (though he at least had the hardihood to go and see them for himself); in 1826 Noel Thomas Carrington accused them of ‘shaming the map of England’ with their ...”

“... RFK Jr remembers the way he felt just a few months before his father was killed, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election in 1968, clearing the path for RFK to ‘reclaim the throne in memory of his brother’. Once again there was going to be a Kennedy in the White House.‘We’re going to win,’ I said to myself for the first ...”

“... Like many before him (Leavis, for one), Trotter believes that the common reader as Samuel Johnson conceived of him and relied on him was already disappearing from the scene by the time Johnson died. Trotter strikes out on his own by pondering the significance in this respect of a figure like Wordsworth’s ‘Old ...”