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“... What, into this?’ It is the essential incongruity they capture which makes the words of Haile Selasse, Emperor of Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, as he was unceremoniously bundled by the revolutionary guards into the back of an orange Volkswagen van, so much more telling than other images of revolution – the lonely figure on the balcony of the Winter Palace, besieged by his hungry people, the voluptuary tyrant shot through his immaculate shirt-front at his own banqueting table and bleeding into the fish, the scurrying fugitive clutching the crown jewels as he escapes to Claridge’s in his private jet ...”

“... Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy describes the practice of a woman doctor working alone in an inner-city wasteland: The receptionist was replacing a lavatory seat when we arrived. The other had been torn off. So that I could be shown round, a cupboard was unlocked and inside it was a small metal wall safe. Inside that, row upon row of keys. It was like visiting a gaol ...”

“... Flu has just hit London, and you are not feeling very well. You have swollen glands and a cough, perhaps with a sore throat; you are running a temperature, tend to sweat in bed at night, and your bowels are a bit upset. To most of us an attack of this kind is unpleasant and inconvenient, little more than that. For others it brings doubts that are a plague worse than the disease, fears that cause rifts between themselves and their loved ones, and a growing realisation that they are going to be cast off by mankind, possibly for good ...”

“... The pianist is stopped mid-cadenza as he suddenly remembers his fingers. The lover is recalled from ecstasy by a fractionally too great awareness that he needs to consult an erotic zone. The poem grinds into prose. The Goddess of Nature cedes to the Department of the Environment. It might be called a modern affliction: an excess of self-consciousness, a doing of things by rules, a misplaced hungering for certainty ...”

“... their discipline and offer little more than attitudinising in its place. Another morbid symptom is Iain McGilchrist’s meandering and infinitely tedious non-argument that ‘the only genuine critical theory is that of no theory’. Mr McGilchrist is a fellow of All Souls and an upholder of that élitist culture which ...”