“... suffragettes, gave her son his first exposure to the possibilities of protest through non-violent means.Scrapes with the law were already part of the Tippett family mythology. In 1898 Tippett’s paternal grandfather, George, and his father, Henry, were arrested on charges of obtaining money under false pretences. Henry had an alibi and was discharged, but ...”

“... opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, has ...”

“... dog, and if you don’t love my dog you damn well can’t love me.’) In Britain’s War Machine, David Edgerton makes the plausible judgment that ‘no scientist ever had more influence in British history; and probably no academic either.’* The Churchill who decided these matters was almost always a Churchill-Lindemann hybrid. Decision-making with respect ...”

“... very finest original pictures … have a certain quaintness by which they partly affect us.’ He means something quite strong by ‘quaintness’, a powerful and indecorous idiosyncrasy, which is certainly what you see in pictures such as The Magic Apple Tree and In a Shoreham Garden – works, Rachel Campbell-Johnston says in her new biography, ‘of mad ...”

“... has a nice line in dry understatement, and knows this is the understatement of the decade. What he means is that he and his fellow-toilers in the biographical olive grove have been racing to make sense of the great heap of myth, obfuscation, blarney and coded revelation dumped on them in Olivier’s Confessions of an Actor. Far from settling questions about ...”

“... David Kunzle’s monumental book, fusing deep historical scholarship with polemical zeal and pictorial acumen, has appeared at an apt historical moment. Several weeks ago I looked up from studying some of its illustrations, and my eye fell on the front-page photograph in that day’s International Herald Tribune. The picture seemed to have slid straight out of Kunzle’s book, from somewhere between Soldiers Threatening a Peasant by Pieter Codde (1599-1678) and Soldiers and Hostages by Willem Duyster (1599-1635 ...”

“... fascist society’s use of clothes, cars and interiors, affluence and wealth, sex and power, as means to avoid thinking about its emergence out of smoking ruins – not to mention its own acquiescence (or worse) in genocide. Fassbinder’s fury at the German middle classes wasn’t just the usual disdain for comfort and hypocrisy; it was a molten hot fury ...”

“... roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately preceding the effective one; by which means the key-note of the jest or sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of his embargoed voice, was delivered with the force of a pistol shot’. Lamb was able to practise what he preached.Lamb’s feel for what he called ‘the ...”

“... in this role. You know – take a look at my sensibility which is surely superior to yours. By all means clatter off to your games, you muddy fools. In truth, of course, I envied them because that was the real poetry, so far as I was concerned.Still is, perhaps.Yes, still is.At your school did you write general essays, as part of the English course? We used to ...”

“... a level playing field of opportunities.’ We know, or think we know, more or less what the phrase means. It’s a way of saying that everyone should have a chance to compete on equal terms from the start, without things being tilted either against them or in their favour. But language carries its own histories, which come to bear without our intending or even ...”

“... anarchy of capitalist society’ and called for a ‘socialist economy’ in which ‘means of production’ would be ‘utilised in a planned fashion’.None of us would say that sort of thing any more. Enthusiasm for comprehensive economic planning collapsed following the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, but it had already been eroded by ...”

“... the message seems clear: if you want to escape the knife, get designated ‘excellent’ by any means possible. And since the criteria of excellence often come down to nothing more than financial expediency, it is not surprising that new rites of self-designation and cargo-cult behaviour should be emerging within the anthropology of academic life. Rather ...”

“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

“... Government turned when the Iran/Iraq War broke out in 1980. Trade was controlled under the Act by means of export control orders issued by government and policed by customs officers. It was quickly announced that no lethal weapons would be licensed for export to either side. Even in these early days, weaponry was thought more likely to be lethal in the hands ...”

“... to survive. Thousands burned to death, trapped below deck. Yet their lives at sea were by no means awful. They went to many countries, in East Asia, the Middle East, even South America, and they got to know some of the women who lived in those countries. Boredom bred a desire for a bacchanal, and the Sylhetis were just as motley and secular as their ...”