“... a rather inconclusive review of the literature on ‘white-collar crime’ by the late John Spencer, and an important critical essay by Paul Hirst on the inability of orthodox Marxism to theorise the joint-stock company. None of these interventions did much to ground their discussion in the developing realities of economic crime in Britain. This ...”

“... Beard, however, is at Newnham. Textual twins, avatars and the vicarious, are one of the book’s major themes. The medium is very definitely the message. Or take hard-case Hartmut, and his partner Heidi, from Heidelberg, an expert in church history, apparently, who requested his identity to be withheld. His long letters contain the most devastating ...”

“... were for our brothers. Indeed, in my year only one girl took a scholarship exam, and that not to a major girls’ school. Some of us did not even sit Common Entrance. Miss Leefield was, I suspect, a feminist of sorts, but without a proper constituency. The wishes of our parents were not that we should become hockey blues and blue-stockings like ...”

“... foreign to Erasmus’s own style: ‘Holy Father’, for ‘Summus Pontifex’ or ‘Father’ John Fisher for ‘R.P. Johannes Phischerius’. Foreign, too, is the Anglican ring of ‘My Lord Bishop’ (for ‘Reverendissime Praesul’). Saddest of all, that syncretism which led pious Renaissance Christians to apply to God the revered titles of Antiquity ...”

“... uneasy about the author’s own aesthetic position: does he really regard Hofmannsthal as a major creative figure, worth half an essay? Is it not, on the contrary, just because Hofmannsthal fitted so well into his time that the Muse did not bestow her ultimate favour on him – timelessness? Schorske brushes aside Karl Kraus’s penetrating stab at ...”

“... was far from being always peaceful. Great exception was taken to Malcolm Moss advertising Major Murchison’s presence in a house of ill fame by standing outside singing a hymn while the major was engaged within; the latter afterwards took his boot to the missionary in no uncertain fashion. The Bombay Guardian found ...”

“... of Thatcherism, coining the phrase ‘authoritarian populism’ for that regime, and surfaced as a major architect of so-called New Times, a revisionist current close to the Communist Party which scandalised traditional socialists with its heretical relish for markets, mobility and shopping malls. Hall was now an enthusiast for the ‘new movements’ around ...”

“... in Bengal and the neighbouring states of Orissa and Bihar (for Calcutta continues to be the major metropolis in Eastern India), not to speak of the continued migrations from poverty-stricken Bangladesh, and one begins to get some idea of where the destitute that Mother Teresa lifts up from the pavements come from. Two facts should be mentioned in this ...”

“... would all this end? Were the churches themselves safe? And this was happening in the midst of a major political crisis at the centre: the old and discarded queen (Catherine of Aragon) dead, the new one (Anne Boleyn) decapitated, an indecently hasty third royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King ...”

“... values for land to be transferred to them from the native owners. The Down Survey was the major vehicle for translating promissory notes into Irish land of appropriate worth. It standardised the measure of estates, in size and in value, and, as McCormick says, ‘commodified Irish land’. Petty himself was a ...”

“... while generous cash handouts were paid to the people of Rome and to the soldiers. In his first major speech to the Senate, he denounced the unpopular actions of his predecessor and promised he would behave better. The canny senators, suspecting that he might forget his promises, ruled that the speech should be recited annually (it looked like a tribute to ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... her fault, poor dear. Twenty years earlier she might have been trading poisoned darts with John Barrymore. But she and her sorority sisters were condemned to representing a girdled, uplifted world whose only edges were in the bones and stitching of their foundation garments. Faced with so much overwhelmingly off-putting evidence, the feminists, and ...”

“... extremely well done and exciting to read, even for those who remember who won. His treatment of major political figures is untypically nuanced: both Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson escape the caricature that popular history has handed down. He writes effectively about the ins and outs of economic policy, charting the complex conflicts between One Nation ...”