“... that a combination of factors, including genetic predisposition, is involved, and that onset may be triggered by a virus. Like lupus and myasthenia gravis, two potentially fatal conditions, MS affects more women than men – the MS Society puts the ratio at 3-2. Susceptibility is thought to be partly related to climate: its incidence is much higher in ...”

“... is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the area in which humility was appropriate, complained that her ‘absence of humility ... narrowed her influence to those whom she happened to like and who happened to like her’. She had a point: there was something of ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”

“... critical works like this ‘will ever make much contribution to the common wisdom’. ‘We may have here an avant-garde that will never be joined by the main army – happy enough behind the lines and content with its familiar rations.’ Kermode is writing these words in 1980, and reflecting not only on Tanner but more generally on the ‘new ...”

“... multimedia work provocative enough to entice the public back to contemporary art galleries they may have visited many times already.Richter somehow manages to do both. On the one hand, he uses an oversized squeegee to make huge colourful abstracts that can sell for £20 million each; on the other, he is the creator of austere constructions in ...”

“... not just in it?’ Nagel says he’s ‘using the term “religious temperament” in a way that may seem illegitimate to those who are genuinely religious’, but it won’t seem illegitimate to those engaged in what Johnston calls the ‘truly religious … life’, only to most of those who are ordinarily thought of as religious, those who are counted as ...”

“... great mystery’ of the president’s ‘power over the very continuance of the world’ may seem excessive, but he’s channelling, so he claims, Dick Cheney, who appears to believe that the president, by virtue of his control of the nuclear bomb, is freed from all constitutional – and even ordinary ethical – restraints. The meaning of ...”

“... legitimate children fathered an illegitimate son who died during the Second World War. In this, he may have been following ancestral precedent: family legend had it that the Reeds were descended from the bastard son of an 18th or 19th-century Earl of Dudley. Henry senior’s other enthusiasms included reading, but the literary abilities of his son Henry ...”

“... In Europe the health-seeker may still go barefoot in dew-treading meadows, as enjoined by Father Kneipp, or sniff the gentle mist from rows of brine-soaked hedges, as at Bad Kreuznach, or wallow in the black mud laid on at almost any decent spa. What the British call sea-bathing is available as thalassotherapy, or, with added sand, as thalassopsammotherapy ...”

“... critical assassins: Carl Weber (‘a boorish vulgarian’), Robert Gittings (‘unscrupulous’), Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly ...”

“... could he have argued that he was doing his country much of a favour. A third consideration may obtain. What if, as is generally the case, your country has its repulsive and attractive sides, and so do your friends, but there is something wrong with you? Some crucial bit of the moral or the rational animal that is, in your own case, simply ...”

“... diaries get their reward. If we see the politics of the Sixties more from the point of view of Richard Crossman than, say, of Michael Stewart, the reason is that Crossman kept a diary and Stewart did not. Nevertheless, the possibility of publication is seldom the only reason for keeping a diary. Like any habit that becomes addictive, diary-writing has its ...”

“... Clarke argues (I am sure correctly) that between its response to We can conquer unemployment and Richard Hopkins’s evidence to the Macmillan Committee the Treasury shifted the ground of its opposition to state-financed capital works from an economic-ideological one to a ‘practical’ one. He seems to suggest (though I ...”

“... utter the profound Post-Modern truth that ‘Politics is showbiz for ugly people.’ Yes, you too may be a mediocre, flaky-scalped, pudgy sycophant. But, with the right ‘skills’, you also can possess a cellular phone and keep a limo on call and ‘take meetings’ and issue terse directives like ‘I want this yesterday, understand.’ Unfortunately, the ...”

“... the work. And she explores this with as much questing and well-furnished unobtrusive cleverness as Richard Sewall brought to his two-volume life of Emily Dickinson – another ‘dotty spinster’, who wrote of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her ...”