“... Life​ as a feminist in the 21st century can be disorientating. Viewed from one perspective, feminism looks to have reached a high-water mark. By the end of the last century, women in many countries had formally secured the freedom to vote, to hold property, to receive higher education and to enter professions formerly the preserve of men ...”

“... Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such abilities, should only be known to the literary world by a satirical work’. It would take another hundred years at least for it to sink in that a man or even a woman might have ‘amiable manners’ and still write a satire; but Collier in fact had ...”

“... Of​ the many enigmas bequeathed by the ancient world to its modern students, few are more tantalising than the seemingly indestructible charisma of Alcibiades (born c.453 bce). After a lifetime of personal scandal, political failure and multiple public betrayals, including that of his country to the Spartans, this enfant terrible still remained, even as a penniless exile, the subject (as Aristophanes makes clear in The Frogs) of intense discussion in Athens ...”

“... from view, except for a promise to the music press that he would return with a new band who would be ‘anti-music of any kind’. That autumn, Rotten unveiled his new enterprise: Public Image Ltd, or PiL for short. Starting with its name, inspired by Muriel Spark’s novel The Public Image, PiL was intended to ...”

“... Astronaut Scott shoves Astronaut Oates off the steps of the module – ‘I am going up now. I may be gone for some time’ – and blasts off. For Dorothy, this is the end of all romance (‘Goodbye spoony Juney Moon’): the men are unworthy of the Moon. Opening in January 1972 at the Old Vic, Jumpers came two and a half years after the Apollo 11 astronauts ...”

“... died one day in the back yard. The Church of England then made my Yorkshireness even more shaky by providing a free boarding-school place in Hertfordshire. My accent lasted little more than a month, and when I returned to Dewsbury two years later, it was with the longer, posher vowels of my mother, who was born and brought up in Surrey. Her father, Grandad ...”

“... mother (whose heart he feared would break at the news) to have the separation allowance that would be her due and half his pay. The experience of trench warfare did not shock Rosenberg into poetry or make him see more clearly. The war may have accelerated his poetic development as much as it cramped its production, but it did not fundamentally change its ...”

“... more private world. A successful sequence can build up different sorts of unity and we need to be careful not to run the pieces together into a single work like the chapters of a novel, and at the same time, in the case of a single author, to look out for the coherence of a sensibility, the various achievements of a style. A Nails on the Head, a first ...”

“... Act to gain access to government documents and had, of course, the huge pile of documents left by the various Watergate investigations, prosecutions and memoirs. His book is not easy reading. Mr Hersh’s prose creaks under the weight of the information he has collected. Here is a typical sentence: ‘The revived interest in the White House wiretaps also ...”

“... since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can deliberate wounding be good sport? Scannell tells of dangerous, exciting weeks in the life of Dave Ruddock, a boxer from Leeds, acknowledged as Middleweight Champion of the World. ‘He had not lost a fight since he was 13 ... Schoolboy Champion of Great Britain, Junior ABA and ...”

“... I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline. Gavin L. is en route for Tangier to see Paul Bowles. I say that Bowles must ...”

“... history, with innumerable forms and functions: something of the truth of human nature is revealed by this fact. Horace saw nothing wrong in it, though himself the son of a freed-man and sensitive about his origins. Debt-bondage has been very widespread in Asia; some Red Indian tribes kept slaves, and were glad to add negroes to their stock. Peer Gynt as ...”

“... and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may ...”

“... The day will come, and perhaps it is not far off, when John Locke will be universally placed among those writers who have perpetrated the most evil among men.’ If Locke has a competitor in this, it is David Hume, ‘the most culpable of these fatal writers who will not cease to damn the [18th] century in the eyes of posterity, the one who has used the most talent with the most composure to produce the most evil ...”

“... in such an obvious evil for so long, and how non-Europeans came successfully to resist it. By contrast, sections of the Right in this country insist on a version of history that will trumpet Empire’s positive achievements, not least out of a present-minded concern to stress that Britain’s role is global not European. The forthcoming Oxford History ...”