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“... answer is no. The president should face some hard facts: his 3 per cent margin of victory over John Kerry doesn’t remotely resemble Reagan’s 18 point knock-out over Walter Mondale. Although 1984 marked a decisive victory over liberalism, last year’s election revealed that the most liberal candidate since Mondale was able to run neck-and-neck with an ...”

“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”

“... practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the NHS, the ...”

“... to sound serious but to sound serious at exactly the right time. He suspects them of impenitent foot-dragging. If they turn serious at all, they do so because the pressure of world events won’t let them wriggle out of it, although they do their best to try. Cunningham pounces triumphantly on any writer whose bad timing causes him to write about a serious ...”

“... disturb the eye and serve no useful purpose; carpets and rugs cry out from the floor to rebuke the foot that would tread upon them; and restless screens seem to topple under the weight of cramped Post-Impressionist landscapes that offer neither beauty nor illusion. The overall effect of the cases in the Crafts Council exhibition is not so far from this. The ...”

“... again. His closeness to it was literary. Paris, the city of his modern heroes, he did not set foot in. It could be said that he wanted to be a big fish in a small pond. But his closeness to Australia was literary too. Even in those fragments which one would like to think of as representing his characteristic voice, there is not much specific about the ...”

“... drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and ...”

“... of Rush’s reasonable and deliberative characters – she is venturing into the Kalahari on foot, with two donkeys, to investigate the experimental village Denoon has set up there. Tsau turns out to be a solar-powered refuge of some two hundred homesteads for poor, mainly spurned and elderly women, run on democratic and egalitarian lines, with only a ...”

“... in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new star has risen in the East.’ Since then, Pamuk has been compared to Joyce and Musil, Kafka and Calvino, and almost never – a further compliment – to the ...”

“... phylactery shouted out by Verres’ victims pleading for a stay of crucifixion), recycled by John F. Kennedy with unavoidable bathos as ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ This great and by no means guaranteed victory against the establishment, as well as the addition of an entire province to his list of clients, helped ease Cicero’s way. But as consul he was ...”

“... the restaurant Sexy Fish, all lava-coloured couches, fountains streaming down the windows and a 13-foot Frank Gehry crocodile on the wall. Sexy Fish is the creation of Richard Caring, most famous for the Ivy, the restaurant in Soho that flaunts its exclusivity by being as apparently modest and downbeat as possible. That works for the posh English, but modern ...”

“... panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he will never be able to ride again, Sainty ‘heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. “Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,” he said.’ From now on, Sainty’s lameness will be the useful badge of his ...”

“... volumes: the three Forster codices in the V&A (formerly owned by Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster), for instance, actually contain five notebooks. The largest concentration of notebooks is in the Institut de France in Paris; they arrived in France en masse in the 1790s, Napoleonic booty expropriated from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Others are in ...”

“... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...”

“... too in that you’re not blitzed with information, exhibitions and outreach as soon as you set foot in the door. Here is Collingwood, Nelson’s admiral, and an 18th-century general in the Deccan Rifles, dead on the voyage out; surgeons and solicitors of the town, neat, kneeling Tudors, plump Augustan divines and an atmosphere of piety, property and Pledge ...”