“... a detailed narrative of the life of the Prophet Muhammed, prefaced this with a quotation from Ernest Renan on the origins of Islam: ‘Its roots are at surface level, the life of its founder is as well known to us as those of the Reformers of the 16th century.’ But in recent decades various scholars, working mostly out of Britain, Germany and ...”

“... the worst of all. Janet Morgan, A Life of Her Own From the very first page of this book (‘Sir Ernest was larger than life’) to the very last (‘Truth is stranger than fiction’) the cliché is entirely sovereign. It is a sentimental cliché, compared to which Evangeline Pembury’s Rue for Remembrance (of which Miss Postlethwaite ...”

“... and navy blue of the Caribbean as you would if you turned round and looked behind you. Palm Island may be bigger than Primrose Hill, but I think London Zoo would spill over into the sea if it was moved here. Mostly, what the handful of people staying here do is lie breathtakingly still in the sun and watch big white boats with tall triangular sails go by ...”

“... some correlations of cause and effect. Edward Jenner (as well as developing the cow-pox vaccine) may have been the first to identify calcification of valves and arteries with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The ...”

“... a true Jacobin; Bronterre O’Brien, the nearest Jacobinism came to producing a true Chartist; and Ernest Jones, the nearest Chartism and Jacobinism came to producing a great poet. There is a smattering of late Jones and late O’Brien, but, by this time, Jones had fallen on hard times and O’Brien, invariably drunk, kept falling over. Harney doesn’t get a ...”

“... own power bases in the party, like Arthur Henderson or Herbert Morrison, or in the unions, like Ernest Bevin, or had a political standing, like Aneurin Bevan or James Callaghan, that made them to some extent proof against their leader’s displeasure. With the exception of Gordon Brown, and possibly John Prescott, no member of the present cabinet has such ...”

“... for the succession in 1963. Since it takes more than one-eighth of his total of 150 pages, this may seem disproportionate, but it ought to be available somewhere in book form. It is one of the most remarkable articles ever written by an ex-minister. Macleod’s account raises another major problem for the contemporary biographer. There can be no doubt that ...”

“... at what was the Ministry of Labour and is now the Department of Employment. He rose from being Ernest Bevin’s private secretary to Permanent Under-Secretary. He observed the whole story of governments’ relations with the trade unions during the post-war period from the inside. During the most fateful of those years, the ones which saw ‘In Place of ...”

“... of a stoical attitude as involving the complete eradication or repression of all emotions? William Ernest Henley’s 1875 poem ‘Invictus’, which Brennan invokes in illustration, with its talk of being ‘bloodied but unbowed’, ‘master of my fate’, ‘captain of my soul’, hardly suggests an aspiration to be a block of wood. Thankfully, the book ...”

“... the ‘fringe’ people will be either to conform (i.e. buy some trousers), conceding that they may not be so different in other ways either, or else to fetishise their distinctiveness as perceived from the centre. In the latter case, the revenge of the centre is sweet: send in the debunkers; Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has a selective nose for fakes, got the ...”

“... investigate her history at length and conclude that though the birth of psychoanalysis through her may have been a myth, it was a necessary one. The pro-woman side of Freud’s ambivalence is visible in his warm descriptions of his early patients: Cäcilie M. was ‘uniquely gifted’ and a ‘highly intelligent woman’, Emmy von N. a ‘highly ...”

“... or it might be an adult white blood cell. The information derived from such a genetic screen may bear on a person’s future health, life-expectancy and mental stability. Science has presented us with these far-reaching new possibilities before their implications have been thought through. In the United States, doctors and scientists are worried that ...”

“... strong. Certainly Chenoune has read his Chateaubriand and his Proust, his Scott Fitzgerald and his Ernest Hemingway, as well as the Tailor and Cutter and Journal des Tailleurs; he has studied a history of the Hawaiian shirt and he knows where to put his hand on the fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue. His objective approach is praised in a preface by Richard ...”

“... between the Somme and Passchendaele, but Lawrence asked only that ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ Birkin enraged by ‘the disgrace of outspread London’ is not the same as his creator enraged by the disgrace of the Western Front. Lawrence’s point, of course, was that London and the Western Front were part of ...”

“... has been, over the decades since, a writers’ book, praised by T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway and many other notables, but always selling modestly. Hemingway describes it in his letters as ‘the classic example of the really fine book that could not sell’, and suggests that its problem was ‘a style that no one who had not read a good ...”