“... is too highbrow. Instead of Germaine Greer, there is Navratilova. When a poet does scrape in, like Robert Frost, all one needs to know is that he was famous, not why. Success matters more than states of the soul; the successsful are the pagan gods of ordinary life. The reader is judged to need ‘real’ facts, the kind Mrs Thatcher wants schoolchildren to be ...”

“... people – what they are like as sources of testimony, whether and in what circumstances they may be trusted.’ Applying these thoughts to the Early Modern period – and particularly to the study of Robert Boyle – Shapin showed that science in this period, and by implication not only then, was effectively a ...”

“... author, William Jackson, a prominent figure in Exeter musical life. In a letter of 3 October 1799 Robert Southey sent Coleridge the unusual story he had recently heard from Jackson. At the age of 16 Bampfylde had gone to see the composer in Exeter, and had astonished him with his remarkable powers of improvisation on the harpsichord. Even after taking ...”

“... monastic orders to satisfy her desires. But by allowing anger to vent itself in laughter satire may often be a substitute for, not a summons to, revolution. Rochester’s obscene ‘Satyr on Charles II’ was the work not of a puritan revolutionary but of a privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy ...”

“... It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions ...”

“... take it, is that if practical, adaptative emotions are replaced by others, we do not simply, as it may seem, withdraw from the world. We change it, or it changes with us. I don’t know how far we can go with Musil down this road, or how far he himself, ever the target of his own irony, believed we could go. But the mode of thinking shown here, what Musil ...”

“... ineffectiveness was partly caused by ineffective leaders. Where was the Labor equivalent of Sir Robert Menzies – a man of great physical presence and even greater political cunning? The answer, when it finally came, was Gough Whitlam. He was a man of commanding height, a middle-class barrister like Menzies, a skilled debater, supremely self-confident, a ...”

“... ideology’ existing in some significant relation to the social and political mood of the time. Robert Conquest’s anthology came out in 1956, the year of Suez, so the ‘ideology’ must have been formed during the administrations of Churchill and Eden. The first Attlee Government carried out the programme enthusiastically endorsed by the troops in ...”

“... they fear that the martyr-venerating warriors of Islam and the rough Catholics of Latin America may not be deterred from small-scale warfare by the threat of international escalation. Acts of Faith, Hans Koning’s scenario, warns of a danger of global nuclear war arising from the Hispanic connections of the United States. Tim O’Brien’s more discursive ...”

“... War and the feverish nostalgia for Edwardian privilege that it set in train; and although one may not have much sympathy for the sound of the upper classes weeping over their losses, it isn’t always easy (or necessary) to resist their sad chronicles of the charm before the storm, with every moment cherished in retrospective anticipation of its ...”

“... he free-associates: on the rubber air hoses used by traffic engineers to monitor passing cars, Robert Boyle’s General History of the Air, the vacuum in an unopened jar of peanut butter, playing the French horn, personal ventilation jets on planes (‘a participatory jet engine for each passenger’); he ruminates, too, on the paedomorphosis of pet ...”

“... history of this interaction and examines its consequences. He makes the claim with his title (I May Be Some Time) and subtitle (‘Ice and the English Imagination’) that the mythic status of Captain Oates’s fruitless self-sacrifice is the direct result of the accretion of meaning around the idea of the snowy wastes. To the cultural historian, just to ...”

“... sent five thousand marines to Lebanon, and not a hair out of place. Dear Ike. This distinction may be a helpful one. Though Eisenhower might have been a moral coward on matters such as McCarthyism and segregation, he often expressed himself in private as a prisoner of public opinion and regarded colleagues like Nixon, for example, as distasteful political ...”

“... emerge.Historical debates have a way of coming back full circle, however. The French Revolution may no longer look like the hinge of world history, but many historians would put the rise of capitalism in that position. Indeed, the ‘history of capitalism’ has become a popular subfield, with its own conferences, journals and faculty positions. The ...”

“... win the next election, had by April swung to a 56-23 majority prophesying a Labour victory. In the May local elections the Tories won just 505 seats to Labour’s 1721, leaving Labour in control of 31 out of 33 metropolitan districts. Thatcher was on the ropes and it was entirely her own fault. At which point the Treasury (Major, Lamont) and the Foreign Office ...”