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“... or 2004 – there is likely to be substantial crossover of support between the two main parties. No surprise, then, that the cycle of presidential and vice-presidential debates – starting on 26 September in Mississippi and ending on 15 October in New York – is being seen as the decisive factor. Contrary to the publishers’ blurb, Newton Minow and Craig ...”

“... phraseology beloved of macho commerce. Successful business operatives (‘winners’) waste no time on words. The imperative forms of ‘will’ and ‘shall’ feature prominently (‘I will drown and nobody shall save me,’ as the unlucky Frenchman is supposed to have shouted to impassive British spectators on the shore). By the year 2000, we are ...”

“... of signs, whose meanings derived from its own codes and not from congruence with reality.’ No congruence? How arbitrary a signifier is a doublet representing a doublet? This is excess, not insight – a good critic suddenly subservient to a cliché. As important to Hattaway is a vaguely Hillish view of English history. He believes that late Elizabethan ...”

“... the South of England, I knew him entirely through those ubiquitous colour reproductions, and had no idea of him as a painter, of how he put paint onto canvas. He seemed to have ignored all that had happened to painting in the 20th century. His figures, someone told me once with warm approval, were ‘really sweet’, but it was those figures that seemed to ...”

“... I knew next to nothing about. First things first: I got up from my desk and walked out of the exam hall to the lobby, where I lit a cigarette – it was 1985, and that sort of thing was possible. As I smoked, I settled on a question about the wine trade during the Hundred Years’ War. I knew about the wars; what I knew about the wine trade was that I knew ...”

“... until the foundation of Cardinal College (renamed Christ Church after Wolsey’s fall). It did no harm to Magdalen that Wolsey, who was one of its fellows, himself became Henry VIII’s chancellor. When I was senior bursar of the college in the early 1980s I had the pleasure of presiding over the topping out ceremony when we completed the restoration of ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... couldn’t be measured. Same with dance music in the heyday of the dance bands: Jack Payne, Henry Hall and Ambrose were all tuneful and popular; the more rarified Fred Elizalde at the Savoy was so disliked that he had to be dropped from the rota. And for the first time, as far as I know, a history of pre-war radio pays serious attention to the BBC’s ...”

“... Atheist Society were rumoured to have taken as their motto a line from Julius Caesar: ‘There is no fellow in the firmament.’ Anyone else who believes anything strongly could do almost equally well. So it was only a matter of time before Shakespeare became a feminist. To do Dr French justice, though, she does not exactly claim that: only that he was fully ...”

“... Brits still call the Yank. For a century, in boys’ comics, thrillers, magazine humour, music-hall sketches and pre-war films, the American was a loud-mouthed, boastful vulgarian who always claimed that whatever he had must be the biggest, the rarest or the most expensive in the world. The Yank was never satisfied with a fair share, we thought, and I well ...”

“... draughtsman whose main income came from rendering the designs of others, or rather of one other: John Soane, who first employed him as a draughtsman and later gave him individual commissions and other financial support. He seems to have been difficult and touchy. He had trouble making enough money to keep himself and a large family, and died ...”

“... for a more discriminating understanding of the texts. Both taught and published in America. John Unrau and Jeanne Clegg have enabled us to see Ruskin’s relations with Venice in a new light: one works in Canada, the other in Italy. Important collections of correspondence (Bradley’s editions of the letters from Venice and the Cowper-Temple ...”

“... of Hatfield Forest – already harassed almost beyond endurance by air traffic – will be made a no-go area, with intensified noise and pollution. And all this despite objections from the budget airlines themselves, who don’t even want the new development (they know they’ll end up paying). In the south of the county, the sirens of regeneration are ...”

“... heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying to her husband: ‘Remind me to tell Austin that there is no main verb in that sentence.’15 January, Yorkshire. Trying to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for 1956-59. It’s depressing to read as very little of it is factual and most of it to do with my slightly sickening obsession ...”

“... had a phrase about the ‘great heart of Beethoven’, the rider to which was that it would make no sense to talk about the ‘great heart’ of Shakespeare. So much the worse for Beethoven, might be the sentiment of a non-philosopher who did not share Wittgenstein’s passion for music. But his point has its ramifications. Like Tolstoy, whose didactic tales ...”