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“... as a result of hard thinking about England’s national and international economic condition. Like David Katz, whose study of Cromwell’s proposal of 1655 to readmit the Jews to England argued that that scheme owed nothing to economic calculation and everything to millenarian belief, Pincus is sometimes willing to discount economic motivation altogether. At ...”

“... Verse: ‘Art, as the late Professor R.G. Collingwood pointed out, is not Magic, i.e. a means by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.’ Similarly, when he writes in 1932, It is going ...”

“... from that quarter, ‘English’ at Cambridge was to be the prosecution of Liberalism by other means. At least this made a change from the agendas of scholars whose politics were less readily discernible, such as W.W. Greg, founder of the Malone Society, editor of Henslowe, author of The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, and left it until later in life to ...”

“... no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the course of his peroration during last winter’s impeachment proceedings: ‘The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a ...”

“... influence can work only as a contaminant. Brushing over the historic truth is a habit by no means confined to the Victorians. Into this situation, which becomes more fervidly ahistorical by the year, no more disturbing intellectual projectile than Norman Davies’s could have been launched. His book divides into two rather different halves. The ...”

“... keep telling you that a particular phrase is indeed proverbial and that you can find out what it means by consulting the Oxford Dictionary of English ...”

“... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...”

“... led to massive concentrations of industry and, in the 19th century, to the railways as a means of distribution. Both sources of power therefore give geographic and quantitative indicators for the economy. Some of the maps in Water Power in Scotland stress the sharp upturn in the economy after 1770, and the whole story of the use of this power shows ...”

“... of), with European diseases, with money, with intermarriage – even with kindness. Whatever the means and the intention, and however the indigenous people may have collaborated in their own downfall, history has rolled cruelly over the Maori race. Today they are disproportionately the urban proletariat, the unemployed, the disaffected. From their 10 per ...”

“... East-West axis is, I believe, that it is the axis of power, of history; to go from East to West means to go from war to peace, from Communism to Capitalism, from old to new, from sentiment to hygiene; it is the route of the Jews, of political and other refugees. One has only to think of the many passages in Roth that describe the sad songs of fugitives and ...”

“... Crisis of Drug Addiction’, though some of his historical observations show that this is by no means the first such crisis in Britain. The drink problem in 18th-century London, so powerfully recorded by Hogarth and Fielding, was certainly a crisis. The liquor known as Geneva – familiarised by British tipplers as ‘gin’ – was introduced by the Court ...”

“... The broadcast was an exercise in propaganda. At the end, however, ‘the hapless, but by no means witless, prisoner’, as Said calls him, outflanks his interrogator, who is blinkered by counter-insurgency jargon. Israeli broadcaster: Lastly, Mr Terrorist: would you like to send a message to your family? Palestinian fedayi: I’d like to assure my ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... Blundell heretically declared it unnatural and took a short way to putting matters right. ‘By means of a little castration and cutting away the brats it became a sleeping Venus and as pleasing a figure as any in this collection.’ Knight went about wholeheartedly preaching the cause of free love and paganism, to which he adhered as a matter of practice ...”

“... an electrician at the huge naval dockyard, remembered him [Hore-Belisha] at the 1935 hustings’ means ‘The only person we could find who remembered anything of Hore-Belisha [and it turns out not to be much] was one Ron Lemin.’ More serious is the use of ‘later’: ‘Later he [Foot] wrote of the show trials: “How deeply the left craved to give the ...”