“... to the highly specialised monograph, it becomes all too easy to devalue, if not to denigrate, more general surveys of the past. Yet in Britain, and for slightly different reasons in the United States also, such texts can and do play an important, and entirely valid, role in the teaching of American history. Since the Second World War the history of the ...”

“... am sure, dismiss the notion of civil defence against nuclear attack as absurd. Twenty years ago or more, Peter Cook in Beyond the Fringe made a delicious mockery of the notion that you should get into a paper bag in order to protect yourself against nuclear fall-out, and the Government’s recent pamphlet, ‘Protect and Survive’, caused both protest and ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, it is said, believed the history of humanity could be written in six words: ‘They lived, they suffered, they died.’ As a historical account this was more than adequate. It depicted change over time, contained a point of view, and encapsulated a universally applicable lesson ...”

“... said, the airplane ‘penetrates the misery of towns’. ‘Planners of postwar America,’ Thomas Campanella writes in Cities from the Sky (2001), ‘approached the city not as street-level observers steeped in its messy vitality, but with the clinical detachment of surgeons hovering over an operating table.’ Small wonder, then, that postwar planners ...”

“... like the aforesaid Harriet who is one of the only sensible women living beside thee & me & 2 or 3 more I know. The first thing she published was an engagingly enthusiastic endorsement of charitable schools in the poorest districts of London. She was particularly impressed by the Jewish foundations. ‘Little Jew babies are uncommonly like little ...”

“... stagger and seem agitated, and cried out so immediately. Mr Downey then fired two shots, and I one more. We retired from the jungle, and, a few minutes after, Mr Munro came up to us, all over blood, and fell … I must observe, there was a large fire blazing close to us, composed of ten or a dozen whole trees; I made it myself, on purpose to keep the tigers ...”

“... good third of the whole book and best explains what is going on. There are, as he rightly remarks, more misunderstandings of Empson’s critical positions than is defensible. For example, Empson’s loose association with the American New Critics of long ago has given rise to the notion that he agreed with their anti-intentionalism, although for forty years he ...”

“... Somozas and Castros will be replaced by Allendes, that larger numbers of people will lead longer, more leisured lives, and that we shall eventually get solar power and nuclear disarmament. For we are still thinking in a ‘liberal’ or ‘hegemonic’ or ‘scientistic’ or ‘technocratic’ or ‘rationalistic’ way. This way of thinking is, we are ...”

“... to drugs, but to exercise, clean living, and cheerfulness.’ Drugs, anyone? Nothing could seem more absolutely consigned to history than the combination of a strong pair of legs and a healthy cast of mind that so powerfully appealed to the late Victorian intelligentsia. ‘He was all wire and whipcord,’ one of Meredith’s contemporaries recorded, ‘and ...”

“... What are we going to write about now?’ one of Ulster’s more engagé poets half-jokingly inquired soon after the IRA’s ceasefire was announced. One would imagine that Paul Muldoon will be among the Northern Irish poets least directly affected by whatever happens – or doesn’t – in the Province. His poetry has always reflected political events in the most delicate of styles, avoiding overt judgments, sentimental ideals, commitments or solutions, instead teasing out angles of irony and embodying states of impasse – ‘that eternal interim’, as he calls it in ‘Lull’ – with a sophistication that must be its own reward ...”

“... out by Hamilton himself to an earlier holder of the Edinburgh professorship of Moral Philosophy, Thomas Brown. It is less easy to understand Mill’s identification of the intuitionism of Reid and Hamilton and of Kant’s a-priorism with resistance to the cause of political and social reform, and of his own – and presumably therefore Hume’s ...”

“... a practical side, since the exported teachers on whom it relied were clearly less expensive, or more expendable, than the regiments of soldiers whose functions they fulfilled. They were also, arguably, more effective. The purpose-built academic subject called ‘English literature’ quickly became an important symbol of ...”

“... But the seeming invincibility of the acrobats, and of Lilian Bland, is not guaranteed. What is more often up in the air, in Morrissey’s worried view, is the future, and specifically the future of children. ‘At the Balancing Lakes’ recalls a drowning child dragged out of the water and the awful moments before she miraculously vomits. In ‘The Singing ...”

“... now her husband, as well as aide to Senator James Burden Day, whose daughter, Diana, was becoming, more and more, the center of Peter’s daydreams. Readers of the earlier novels will find such sentences irritating in part because they are familiar with the episodes alluded to; those who haven’t read them will find them ...”

“... incorporate Scotland led to incursions that have been forgotten, she argues, because of the later, more united history of the island. The 16th century saw the ‘erasure’ of Scotland from England’s idea of Britain, which was perceived as an extension of itself. Maps reduced Scotland to a coastal outline while such encyclopedic works as The Faerie Queene ...”