“... the ANC or Polisario – two groups who have made considerable diplomatic gains – merely drove home the ‘forgotten’ character of the Eritrean conflict. After a few moments, a decisive silence would take hold, followed by a peremptory change of subject or a general dispersal. Over the land itself, a similar vexed silence seems to preside. During periods ...”

“... with Gladstone dead, and Chamberlainite imperialism at its zenith, dangerous schemes such as Home Rule seemed to be off the cards. A valuable radical inheritance was there to be won: Lloyd George was ideally equipped to claim it. As Professor Gilbert shows, land reform – or more crudely, attacks on landlords – constituted the one completely ...”

“... people, who met in pubs, drank draught cider and sometimes read each other their works. It is Lord of the Rings country and yet, interestingly, social nuances appear even in this consciously Christian and nostalgic setting. Tolkien the Catholic could not stand Lewis’s fundamentalist allegory, as exemplified in tales like The Lion, the Witch and the ...”

“... have had the subsequent arrival of the fisherman who had lent Pringle dry clothes for the trip home, and the extensive discussion of how much to tip him, and whether to offer him a drink:   Mrs Race said: ‘This sort of question is always so difficult to settle. Afterwards one always feels one has given either too much or too little.’   Barlow ...”

“... Taylor, chief executive of Barclays Bank, to lead a Whitehall task force on tax and benefits, Lord Hollick, chairman of United News and Media, to advise on industrial policy, and Peter Jarvis, Whitbread chief executive, who was asked to head the Low Pay Commission, charged with setting the rate for the planned legal minimum wage. In previous Labour ...”

“... plots both of Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh present, in their contrived and melodramatic ways, a deep home truth: that there is nothing demeaning in a woman’s dependence if it involves the equal dependence of her man. When her sister Henrietta finally managed to marry her soldier lover Surtees Cook, in the teeth of their father’s antagonism, Elizabeth Barrett ...”

“... war with East Asia and Sandino is, maybe even was, a Christian. Well, that’s a relief. Thank the Lord for Newspeak. So why not thank the Pope for Lordspeak? It’s a bit the same when we come to Ireland, about which O’Brien writes with deep knowledge and passion. At the end of the day he seems to have swallowed the whole of the Ulster Protestant case. He ...”

“... feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to ...”

“... festivities in 1998, pilgrims flocked by the busload to the Rhineland abbey she founded, the home today of a flourishing Benedictine community. By the time the nuns of Eibingen had received 150,000 guests in six months, they decided that it was time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II ...”

“... editor appears and fortunately Professor Kimball does not qualify. He is not absolutely at home in British affairs and has managed to introduce a few minor errors on this front. He refers to the ‘Lloyd George Liberal Government of World War One’, refuses to admit Sir Stafford Cripps to the War Cabinet in 1942, and thinks that Balaam was ‘a name ...”

“... man under his vine: ‘Tonight they will surely come. Armour the leaves, Lock up the tree, Call home the dead and be prepared.’ And Carmi comments: ‘The introduction of the anachronistic telephone into the body of a famous biblical idiom for peace and peace of mind – “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree and none shall ...”

“... says, is almost always shorter than bad, and the short is also more memorable, as exemplified by Lord Bacon’s comment on an ambitious political rival: ‘He doth like the ape, that the higher he climbs the more he shows his arse.’ For models Medawar suggests various philosophers and essayists who wrote or still write brilliant prose – but a young man ...”

“... and in England Doris Lessing also seems to have gone galactic, or at least inter-planetary. The Home Office, for its part, still promises survival for the homely. In view of all this, one is tempted to proscribe any further dealings with one’s apocalyptic self, for fear of giving comfort to the enemy. But it won’t do: that self is in all of us, for good ...”

“... to milk Shapiro dry. After a particularly ugly late-night scene with Liza and Micki, Shapiro runs home to Celia – whom he finds, like a character in some old farce, at the back door hastily bidding goodbye to her own illicit lover. Shapiro packs his bags and liquidates his assets; he makes his way to Israel, where he divorces Celia, marries a good ...”

“... state of affairs? Are there not important differences between the qualitative inequalities of the lord and his serfs and the quantitative inequalities of a professional and a working class? Has not the generalisation of citizenship made a difference? And has not Fred Hirsch – not mentioned a single time in this book on inequality! – made points about the ...”