“... Here begins a review of two books which are largely collections of reviews, and some readers, reviewing it, are sure to ask whether this flea-on-flea process is desirable or even tolerable. My feeling is that such criticism is prejudiced ...”

“... plastic bath toys: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. A year later, hundreds of the things began washing up on the islands around Sitka, Alaska, and amateur beachcombers practising the imperfect science of driftology started mapping the path ...”

“... Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark – but had the curious deficiency of devoting relatively little space to England, which is, even from Nairn’s Marxist and Scots nationalist vantage-point, the heart of the matter ...”

“... Robert Martin’s book is not one of those literary biographies that reshuffle a familiar narrative and perhaps add a few bits of new information or conjecture. It is a full-scale life, founded on primary sources, many of them previously unpublished ...”

“... Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ 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 contribution to Britain’s invisible exports ...”

“... to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives. But at times it strikes you that the cult of specificity in Hemingway is a drug you take in a cheap arcade: lights flash on the old machines and a ...”

“... When Asa Briggs​ got a job at the University of Leeds, he and his wife bought what he considered an ‘imposing’ villa on the outskirts of the city. Waspishly, the historian A.J.P. Taylor described it as ‘like Asa himself, small, squat and full of Victorian bric-à-brac ...”

“... Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan.’ Many ...”

“... Ann Douglas’s The Feminisation of American Culture, first published in 1977, now appears in Britain at the same moment as its long-delayed successor, Terrible Honesty. Looking back at the earlier book, Douglas remarks that her ‘excavation and re-evaluation of American feminine 19th-century literature’ has been continued by many other historians, mostly women, who have rebelled against what she calls, in tones more civil than those of some of her successors, a literary canon consisting ‘of almost exclusively male-authored, conspicuously shaped and achieved works ...”

“... Second-hand book dealers will tell you that of all Bernard Shaw’s out-of-print works, the volumes of music criticism have been in most constant demand. It is therefore excellent news (except perhaps to second-hand book dealers) that the Bodley Head has now issued, in the same chunky format as the Collected Plays, these three volumes containing all Shaw’s writings on music ...”

“... In the late 1950s, when I went up to Oxford, one of the liveliest and most provocative lecturers in history was Lawrence Stone of Wadham. He was already a controversial figure who had, as we all knew, crossed swords with Hugh Trevor-Roper over the state of the Elizabethan aristocracy and with Geoffrey Elton over the question of Tudor despotism ...”

“... For every one book or article on the Conservative Party, there used to be ten on Labour and the Left. Lacking as they were in sympathy for Toryism, most academics seemed also to lack curiosity about it. Today the position is very different. The shattering experience of living through Mrs Thatcher’s counter-revolution has awakened both historians and political scientists to the fact that Conservatism is one of the central mysteries of 20th-century British history ...”

“... How should​ a visual artist respond to a culture in which the vast majority of images are produced by machines for other machines, with humans left out of the loop? This technological turn complicates basic ideas about mimesis: that images represent the world, that they are meant to be beheld by us, that they mean at all (think of facial-recognition programs alone ...”

“... do we really have to talk about it? Earl Winterton, aged 71, introducing a debate in the House of Lords in 1954, apologised for bringing forward ‘this nauseating subject’. In his youth it was never mentioned in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter in ...”

“... Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men. You will rely on him time and time again to maintain security. He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in’: thus Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, 1968 ...”