“... for example, is treated at length. Changes in printing methods meant that books became available more widely than ever before in an increasingly literate society. The establishment – particularly the high-minded clergy – were caught in the awkward position of promoting literacy, but at the same time attempting to guide, if not exactly censor, the texts ...”

“... them from the public’. Despite their many imperfections, the early census counts provided a far more robust statistical picture than was previously possible and, by revealing the scale and pace of population growth, Rickman’s tables confounded contemporary assumptions about the relationship between demography and prosperity. Population was a controversial ...”

“... as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each ...”

“... work is what it means, and answering this question requires practice, effort, and the knowledge of more than the book alone. The last point is oddly controversial. Facts about how the books originated are given in new editions, as though they matter. Meanwhile teachers of literature generally insist that reading well means ignoring such redundancies and ...”

“... with that question which has the most general claim to interest: how has it come about that little more than a decade short of its centenary the most fundamental and distinctive claims of psychoanalysis should still be the subject of radical scepticism. That we are entering the shabby world of psychoanalytic apologetic becomes apparent from James Hopkins’s ...”

“... of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... thought it safe Stock returned to Britain, probably about 1803, and was taken on by the radical Dr Thomas Beddoes as an assistant at his Medical Institution for the Benefit of the Sick and Drooping Poor at the Hotwells, Bristol; and when Beddoes died a few years later, his widow, Anna, commissioned Stock to write up his life and works. He responded by ...”

“... who were, as the cliché goes, famous for being famous. But in her life Antonia White was never more than fairly famous for being fairly famous; and her work cannot bear any more weight than it has already had to. Sadly, for herself and for us, she was a writer with serious limitations. The success of Frost in May, which ...”

“... perestroika, it was even possible to see the point of another ubiquitous slogan: ‘Lenin is more alive than all the living!’ Not any longer. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Lenin cult has been systematically destroyed. Thousands of streets and squares, parks and museums, factories and farms, not to speak of towns and cities, have ...”

“... was prime minister than when he wasn’t. The reason that Great Britain is usually happier and more relaxed under a Labour than under a Conservative government lies in the British instinct for self-preservation. The rich are more capable of exercising this instinct than the poor. Better-equipped, better-educated, better ...”

“... 70 questions on it, most of which were answered for almost all the parishes. There was also the more usual information-gathering exercise by interview. The result of the inquiry is an enormous stock of detailed information covering diet, prices, wages, amenities, facilities for saving and social policy. The authors, supported by a grant from the Social ...”

“... the bestselling American novel until Gone with the Wind. Everyone seemed to be very Christian, more than half the books they printed were Bibles, and most of the press operators had served in the army. Liberals in town had started a rifle buy-back programme. I spent the night in the Holiday Inn watching television, which I didn’t have at home, and ...”

“... There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife and producer Emma Thomas at his side), the engagingly modest Nolan will roll out the speech he knows by heart, about the Bomb as the great adventure and turning point of modern times, the exhilarating teamwork that gave us the big bang, and so on. The same attitude gave us ...”

“... seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a ...”

“... to have held that office. Now a non-Jesuit historian has monumentalised the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable ...”