“... by the domination of unions and professional organisations. Not a bad thing in principle, this may have worked, though, to narrow the teacher concerns the Council was prepared to address and to exclude those classroom teachers whose commitment to their work, or vulnerability to its pressures, make such public forums intimidating and unproductive. There are ...”

“... make no allowance. It is enormously important to grasp why the thought is mistaken. Someone may be aware that he knows very little about the workings of, say, the magistrates’ courts or the welfare services, particularly as they affect black people. But he knows, or he thinks he knows, what the level of racial prejudice is amongst the people with whom ...”

“... biography, with its Cambridge imprint, makes this revival official. Even ‘England Arise’ may receive its dusting-off. The question still remains: what England, and what active relationship might this revival have to Edward Carpenter himself? Historians, for what it is worth, have never cared much for Carpenter. Peculiar alliances are struck over this ...”

“... come to view all consensual sex, including consensual paedophilia, positively and without guilt may be necessary for the welfare of everyone.’ ‘Consensual sex’, mutually agreed and mutually agreeable: is there anything unreasonable in wanting it for oneself but not for one’s children – or Mr O’Carroll? Were Mr O’Carroll a more accomplished ...”

“... damage on his torn and battered colleagues. Roy Hattersley’s quaintly-named Solidarity Campaign may reverse some of the wilder decisions taken at the Wembley conference in January, but even if it does the Party will still be committed to an electoral college of some sort, and the leadership will still be even more obviously in thrall to an incompetent and ...”

“... Home Rule came closest to a threat: in the end, it too was absorbed. Where continuity reigns, we may expect the party of continuity to rule. No wonder Disraeli, an essential though not impartial witness, called Toryism ‘the English system’. Yet, as Maitland reminded us long ago, the past was once the future. ‘Who would have thought in the ...”

“... them. What was wrong with me? It is a slight consolation after this lapse of time to feel that I may have been right. How could such a colourful and remarkable personality have written such an unabsorbing novel? Perhaps by an unexpected but logical consequence. Mackenzie himself once said that he thought he would give up writing ‘because living is so much ...”

“... things considered, in the prospects of survival for a species. A temporarily favourable mutation may involve costs in the design of the organism which in the longer run, and in a changed environment, eventually prove disabling and even fatal. So perhaps now for men. Mrs Midgley clarifies, not only the confusions of sociobiology, but also some other ...”

“... been conscious of, and perhaps influenced by, some Power, whether they call it God or not, which may either appear to be beyond their individual selves or partly, or even entirely, within their being’. The accounts would be treated in strict confidence, noted, classified and returned. No harassment – no hissing, no dissection ... And the accounts poured ...”

“... at its most rigid, a duke and an Indian army subaltern were equal in class, however different they may have been in rank or wealth.’ And they go on: ‘there is only one essential prerequisite for being counted among the British aristocracy: the right to be called a gentleman … so that anyone who has inherited the gentlemanly values, or for that ...”

“... and feelinglessness; and it is advisable for us to be reminded at the outset that, while man may have dominion over all the inhabitants of sea, air and earth, he is still himself a species. Miss Brophy’s intention is neither to sentimentalise the animals (though they can generally do with a little of this) nor to put man in his place below the angels ...”

“... impasse. Never the twain shall meet.’ Not a new thought even thirty years ago, but, though we may run into one another occasionally in the corridors of the Humanity Research Center of the University of Texas (their territory), or share a train compartment on the way to Combe Florey (ours), it still holds good for those in the Waugh industry. The English ...”

“... however, the Auk had briefly held command at Narvik in the ‘ramshackle’ Norwegian campaign in May and June 1940. No laurels were to be won by the soldiers in this mismanaged operation, but Auchinleck’s forthright report did not endear him to the War Cabinet. He compared the British troops unfavourably with the French, and used words like ...”

“... book, part self-revelation, part art object. Now, some thirty years on, she has assembled what may be its culmination. Honey from a Weed is less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late modern British cookery book. It is a book like very few others, although it has some of the style of the 17th-century commonplace book, replete with ...”

“... love and all its smart,    Then sleep, dear, sleep. Apart from all this, the reader may receive an illusive impression that the whole thing must have been translated from the French, in which language it would at least sound very much more natural. And yet, amazingly, the emotion, the true and abject affliction, come through, and begin to move ...”