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“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... warmth or extravagance – the one bright book of life, etc – and an hour or two browsing in John Sutherland’s Victorian Fiction will be enough to persuade most readers that not many novelists of that century wrote the bright book of life, or quite came up to the standard set, unless Jane Austen is way over the top, by Fanny Burney. It is generally ...”

“... determine the rest of your life. Born in 1933, Storey took the exam in 1944, the year in which the Butler Education Act came into force. He was one of the saved and made it to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Wakefield. The problems of the grammar-school boy like Storey were anatomised by Richard Hoggart in the last chapters of The Uses of Literacy. As it ...”

“... of a number of recent books by Andreas Malm, opens by quoting an observation made in the LRB by John Lanchester (22 March 2007) that terrorism had thus far been markedly absent from the climate movement.* That might have been a sign of the times. There was little appetite in the years after 2001 for discussion of the merits of terrorism. Even if the ...”

“... was never one for limpid and lofty understatement – and she isn’t here either. Where a Butler or Macmillan would have had a few sparse sentences about local government reform, for example, Thatcher sails in with voluminous figures and a mastery that extends to every last detail of rate-capping, resource equalisation and competitive tendering. The ...”

“... In a 1952 essay for the Venice Biennale on the forged metal sculptures of Chadwick, Armitage and Butler, Herbert Read wrote that they displayed the ‘geometry of fear’ and found allusions to snares, teeth and claws. In the wake of the atom bomb and revelations about the concentration camps, Read’s description helped to determine an angst-filled ...”

“... Why I went I can’t think – the volume was some piece of unreadable bufferdom extruded by Lord Butler, who as ‘Rab’ had never in his life done anything to live down the Greek Street sobriquet ‘flabby-faced old coward’. He himself was vaguely present, moving about the carpet like a terrible tortoise. A sprinkling of hacks and politicos completed the ...”

“... you an astonishing understanding of a political situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ‘impeccably heroic socialist and feminist credentials’. My daughter-in-law brought home Cosmopolitan with a long extract, prettily illustrated, and an ...”

“... well have learned the basics of the art from the recycled works of that universal publisher, Dr John Trusler (d. 1820): ‘Be not dark or mysterious; Affect not absence of mind; Punch no one in conversation; Hold no one by the button; Spit not on the carpet; Dare to be prudish; Avoid mauvaise honte.’ (‘What’s mauvaise honte, Mamma?’ – ‘Oh, ask ...”

“... of Lords, one or more may disagree with his brethren (or in the unique event that Lord Justice Butler-Sloss is sitting, with his sister). But judges are not elected politicians and those in the High Court and above (about whom I am writing) cannot be removed from office. In the absence of this sanction, which to an extent keeps ministers within bounds, it ...”

“... account of how the whisky was served at the Brideshead dinner table, each guest receiving from the butler, if he bespoke it, a decanter holding a quarter-bottle – a ritual which marks the beginning of the descent into hopeless alcoholism of Sebastian Flyte. There is a clear connection between such potent elements of Waugh’s fantasy and the fact that he ...”

“... get a glimpse of this in the account of working for him written by Philip Townsend, who was his butler in London during the 1980s. (Townsend had a dog who died, and whom he kept in Murdoch’s freezer.) When Murdoch made the switch to living more healthily – influenced by the fact that his father died at 67 – he did so by announcing to his ...”

“... man. The coincidence is made more striking by the similarities between George Henry Lewes and John Forster. They were two of the stars of Victorian literary journalism: much in demand as editors, and absolutely reliable in their capacity to produce essays and reviews of first-rate quality on a huge range of topics at an intimidating speed. They both ...”

“... the campaign, as a series of media events contrived to produce a predetermined image. Even when John Major defiantly got out his own soap box, it was an artifact, a television prop, a designer soap box. It was a surrender to show business, a triumph of trivia, a debasement of debate. Never in the history of electoral conflict had so little been said by so ...”

“... death) did not help his case. Nevertheless a powerful counter-attack was launched on his behalf by John Terraine, and these efforts found some support among the new school of ‘War and Society’ historians such as Professor Brian Bond and the present writer, who argued that Haig’s faults were those of the old Army as a whole, and that the problems he faced ...”