“... in on the lowest worked-out seam. This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s the place I may well rest if there’s a spot under the rose roots and the daffodils by which dad dignified the family plot. If buried ashes saw then I’d survey the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek, and left, the ground where Leeds United play but disappoint their ...”

“... Carter’s political errors were legion: but his greatest sin, in the eyes of the American Right, may have been his recognition that the problems of the modern world are complex and that solutions are not simple. The dramatic role reversal of the two major parties – the Republicans now presenting themselves as the party of hope and the Democrats as the ...”

“... address is provided with a telephonic meaning in the form of a number. Fortunately, dictionaries may be not merely instruments of utility but also objects of delight. One recent addition to the ranks which can claim to offer more entertainment value than most is L.G. Pine’s Dictionary of Mottoes. Which householder among us has not had a gas cooker ...”

“... is big, impersonal, corporate and international. In a speech introducing Anti-Mafia legislation in May 1980, Pio La Torre observed: Mafia is a terrifying cancer ... that is, a network of relations. We have to find out where certain lines lead and what is behind them. Instead there is total darkness. Maybe we are afraid to reach out to touch something which ...”

“... revelation’, ‘inner light’ and ‘visible and sensible communion with the angels’ may be appealing as dogmas of dissent, but they are of little help as guidelines of organisation. Infuriatingly if predictably, Utopia turns out to be an objective more utopian than utilitarian. Not surprisingly, then, the names of sects like the ...”

“... before it appeared in print. The Adages also acted as an encyclopedia. ‘To bear the palm’ may not be much of an adage: for Erasmus it was a peg on which to hang a lot of interesting details about what the Ancients believed or did. Anyone with the Adages in his workroom can give the impression of knowing poets by the dozen and ...”

“... municipal catering with youthful experience of school stodge and custard – outdated as that may now be – and remain loyal to the fast-food they know and love. In Socialism in a Cold Climate one may survey broadly the same battlefield but from a higher vantage-point. This, too, is a collection of essays on the ...”

“... objects of moral concern. We see also, reading between the lines, the birth of a cruder idea which may be described as the Mediterranean macho paradigm, the notion that virility depends on being on top and that the gender or even species of what is underneath is immaterial. This alternative view of sexuality, a folk view still extant and not limited to the ...”

“... the worse for knowing what is being said by the mob! This paragraph is dated all right: 1936. We may wince at Agate’s scorn for mincing and reflect that the hearty drill-sergeant reference lends support to James Harding’s portrait of Agate as a straight-acting gay, addicted to guardsmen. However, we now have some idea of Olivier’s effect upon the Old ...”

“... forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history’; we may compare it with the uprootings of peoples by Assyrian or Mongol conquerors. His book is massively researched, with the fullest use of official papers, but with the greatest weight attached to the convicts’ own testimony, surviving in ...”

“... to find. One reason for this is that, as in the case of John Stuart Mill, a writer with whom one may notice many parallels, there is something of a conflict between heart and head, and between the intellectual positions which logic forces him to accept and the ones with which he feels most at home. Although union monopoly power plays a key role in his ...”

“... is that it is definitely “middle-class”. But all schools here are that.’ Beatrice Webb, who may have had some interest in defining the area in which humility was appropriate, complained that her ‘absence of humility ... narrowed her influence to those whom she happened to like and who happened to like her’. She had a point: there was something of ...”

“... and ice’. The Establishment, he says, was ‘determined that, come what may, the Duke of Windsor should never return to live in England, or ever recover any work, influence or honour’. Bloch selects the evidence to support his view. The Windsors’ wedding, he notes, was ‘boycotted’ by the Palace: the only present from the King ...”

“... with artistic works the features of beauty and unexpectedness – qualities which general readers may have been enabled by Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology to perceive in this simple but profound theorem: a prime number that leaves the remainder I when divided by 4 can be expressed as the sum of two squares in one and only one way. Mathematical ...”

“... literary-theoretical criticism in that he has no choice but to express himself in words; and, we may add, to learn about the past in words – through language, rhetoric, texts? Lord Acton wrote that our studies should have the chastity of mathematics. But that can never be, and I, for one, should not desire it. Elton says that historical evidence is that ...”