“... Fielding seems to have been playing on Lady Mary’s hostility to Pope and his friends, and may have hoped through her influence to secure the patronage of the Prime Minister Walpole. There was no love lost between Walpole and the Scriblerians either, and Fielding’s fluctuating attitudes to them are sometimes inverse indicators of where Fielding stood ...”

“... would be the contemporary description. Alas, dignified mutism as a nation is compatible with and may even cause constant pandemonium at home. On that sounding-board of the national soul, the Edinburgh Scotsman’s letters page, I doubt if a week has passed since Scott’s time without its quota of resentful jibes about non-equality and Southern ...”

“... for Innovation, Universities and Skills in the summer of 2007. The detail of these changes may not be riveting, but what it signals about the reshaping of official attitudes towards higher education is striking. Universities and research have come more and more under the aegis of bodies whose primary concerns are business, trade and employment. The ...”

“... DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s own preferred form of ‘amusement’ involved hanging by his fingertips from a ledge on the Matterhorn in the middle of a blizzard, but it is true that an abundance of pleasure, of a certain ...”

“... patients who could sue but who do not, than the numbers who actually do take legal action.’ He may well be right: he is certainly right to suggest that most people in this situation want not revenge or money but a truthful account of what has gone wrong and what is being done to put it right. Litigation is often the resort of the terminally frustrated. But ...”

“... a certain stiffening of dogma which carries it along all the more authoritatively. Her downfall may be due to drink and social pressures, and yet the novel inexorably shows that Jenny is the sort of girl – and not a bad sort either – who is bound for trouble. Today she would be a one-parent family with a permanent entourage of social workers. The last ...”

“... perhaps, of masking (beneath the regret) a covert relish. The fulsome style of the obituarist may creep in, causing one to be sanctimonious about the virtues in order to appear generous about the backslidings. Hypocrisy waits at every intersection. But it remains the fact that Conor Cruise O’Brien has been one of the great stylists of our time, whether ...”

“... Gay has indicated what the nature of the material still being withheld is likely to be, and how it may affect his own conclusions. (Thus one may infer from the evidence hinted at that Freud’s own sex life, which, it had seemed, came to an end when he was not quite 44 years of age, ...”

“... George Eliot better: he helped her work out the legal plot of Felix Holt, a service for which she may have owed him more gratitude than we need to feel. Perhaps she was showing it when she warned Harrison against employing her cook’s daughter, a girl whose underwear she described as ‘arrogantly good’ and whose manners with men she thought ‘too ...”

“... it was very unwarrantable) that the Mobile had.’ Memories of popular action in the 1640s may well explain the desire in 1688-9 to get a king safely on the throne as quickly as possible. Laura Stevenson O’Connell writes on ‘The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale’. ‘Bourgeois’ is a daring word to use in a Hexter festschrift, and Ms O’Connell ...”

“... of Vietnam in our own lifetime. Whether 1945 is quite so significant a moment in itself may be another question. The Japanese were collapsing, the French were not yet in a position to reassert themselves. The real struggle was still to come. Still, it might be said that the fall of the Bastille, or the Bolshevik seizure of power, were also only ...”

“... which also happens to be the period after which deportation is automatic, which means they may just as well have been turned around at the port of entry. The Cambridge report records the story of one victim of trafficking who was sentenced to two consecutive periods of 12 months for using a false document with intent and making a false statement for ...”

“... memory of another but of a nation stooping under the power of its looming next-door neighbour. It may be appropriate for the state capitols of California or Mississippi to defer to the shape of the US Capitol, but Cuba is not a state of the Union. On the cover of my mother’s civics book, the Cuban Capitolio represented an ideal of democracy modelled on the ...”

“... and speeches, which he skilfully edits into a debate with an imaginary American interlocutor.) Lee may have an insalubrious human rights record, but the point he makes needs to be taken seriously. As do the voices of Lee’s victims and critics. Human rights is an activity as well as a theory; it is an exercise in power. It’s not possible to do more than ...”

“... doesn’t, even though an obvious reason for wanting to gag people is the fear that not doing so may cause harm? Clearly, the prospect of such harm can be exploited to squelch opinions one doesn’t care to hear. But the fact that some people cite harm disingenuously doesn’t show that the preponderance of harm arises from a regime of gagging rather than ...”