“... speech on the evening of 21 July. The chorus of praise for the Mansion House speech was by no means confined to the Conservatives: the Daily Chronicle and Daily News both responded with enthusiastic leaders. Lloyd George had pulled off a political coup. Had he also started to acquire an enduring understanding that Britain would have to go to ...”

“... who write poetry of home are often aware of its dangers though they may not always avoid them. David Dabydeen’s ‘Coolie Odyssey’, dedicated ‘for Ma’, and included in Section One of the four-part ‘alternative’ anthology, The New British Poetry, opens: Now that peasantry is in vogue, Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... and sacrifice, by further infusions of Soviet subsidy, and by all-encompassing, though by no means exclusively repressive, systems of social control. But this was never a system which could achieve self-sufficiency in food, let alone adapt and innovate enough to keep Cuba abreast of developments in the outside world. It was not a system, therefore, which ...”

“... essay Wolfgang Kemp gives special attention to the highly controversial frame that Caspar David Friedrich designed for his Cross in the Mountains. It consists of a gothic arch composed of palm fronds, and a predella decorated with wheat, a vine and a diagrammatic eye. In 1808 Friedrich exhibited the painting in this frame in his studio before sending ...”

“... 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 ...”