“... policies, Adam Smith would have recoiled. The social policy he sought to develop was more civilised than anything on offer today from the Howards and the Heseltines, the Portillos and the Lilleys. To be fair to them, most of the Peterhouse School have chosen to expose skeletons in liberal or left-wing cupboards rather than attempt to exhume a ...”

“... possible for him to play the injured party in public.His resignation speech as prime minister – more accurately, a speech promising to stay on as caretaker until the Tory Party elects his successor, a process which could stretch to the end of summer – came after two days during which his administration collapsed around him (there were 62 resignations in ...”

“... must energetically gear himself up to the marital state. His bride would expect him to present a more sociable face to a wider world, to act at ease in mixed company, and to improve everything from his manners to his taste to fit her aspirations. In all likelihood, this would involve a new house, the marital home, or at least a decorative clean ...”

“... shall I get out of this labyrinth?’ Or perhaps invented by an imitator of Borges, someone more dedicated to the explicit and the theatrical – a Borges deeply involved with the European Romantics. Bolivar is almost too much of a good thing for a novelist, and Garcia Marquez never quite decides what to do with him. He avoids the deadpan ironies of his ...”

“... has accordingly been gaining ground. Most significant, in Parliamentary by-elections it has polled more votes than either the Conservative or Labour Parties. There is no over-publicised Alliance bandwagon, as in the winter of 1981-2, but there is a new solidity and stability to the support which it can now mobilise. The obvious conclusion is that the Alliance ...”

“... sterility’ (though he at least had the hardihood to go and see them for himself); in 1826 Noel Thomas Carrington accused them of ‘shaming the map of England’ with their barrenness. Such was the outsider’s or townsperson’s notion of the moors, expanded to a visionary plane by Shakespeare in Macbeth and King Lear. The weather on the heath ...”

“... Street crash, witnesses the rise of Nazism in Berlin (where he attends parties with Fritz Lang and Thomas Mann), and arrives in Hollywood just in time to fall foul of McCarthyism. Any Human Heart (2002) is narrated by Logan Mountstuart, an English author who knocks about Oxford and London with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Henry Green, reports on the Spanish ...”

“... then than it would now. The enterprise on which Liddell and Scott had embarked was perhaps more central to Victorian high culture (the culture that produced Jowett, Matthew Arnold and Housman) than the Oxford English Dictionary itself. There was humour in Liddell and Scott, or so we were told, but it was donnish to the point of desiccation. The entry ...”

“... form the letter g. Other letters followed, until by the end of the week I was unable to produce more than a scrawl. Not even a treasured fountain pen could save it. It all became, as Anne Carson on behalf of us Parkinsonians says, ugly.* What happened next was entirely unexceptional. In Oxford, where I had become a visiting professor, the neurologist, a ...”

“... Bartholomeus Breenbergh, to contemporary British artists such as Amelia Long, Paul Sandby and Thomas Gainsborough, a selection of which are on display. His admiration for Claude Lorrain led him to acquire more than 270 of Lorrain’s landscape drawings, seven of which are included in the show.Of particular interest ...”

“... Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that ‘Shakespeare’ is more than an individual writer: ‘it’ is an institution, a body of texts whose study, from O-level to the highest reaches of academia, is a means of legitimating social advancement and whose production on the stage and on television makes a powerful ...”

“... Street Runners. Fielding the novelist was a tolerant chap who found small infringements of the law more comic than reprehensible. He thought poverty was indeed a cause of crime, and liked to give first-time offenders a second chance. He was the exact opposite of Fielding the magistrate, who set out his views on crime in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late ...”

“... Freud returning to his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) with a new idiom, but no more neurology, on offer. Anna Freud makes no objection to the late system, though she skirts warily round parts of it – describing the death instinct, for instance, without relish. Where some strain shows is with Femininity’: yet the editor’s faith is such ...”

“... urban haunt, was himself a major contributor to the Past and Present series. His new book is a more than worthy member of the illustrious company it seeks to keep. Sustained by a mellifluous style, meticulous scholarship, a powerful historical imagination and profound human sympathy, it is, if not definitive, then at least as good a book as one can readily ...”

“... Empire. In America, by contrast, slavery was a political and social problem. What would happen if more than half a million slaves were suddenly freed? The received wisdom of many observers in the early republic, from Jefferson to Tocqueville, was that blacks and whites would engage in a genocidal war. Before the Abolition Act of 1833, Britain had managed to ...”