“... analysed, reformed. Foucault’s sketch of what ecclesiastical savoir-pouvoir did to pleasure may, in one sense, be called ultra-conventional. As Peter Gay emphasised so well in his The Enlightenment, radical philosophes hated the Church above all for its sexual mutilation of mankind. Christian dirty-mindedness (Diderot has his wise Tahitian say) had ...”

“... heroes from history, toilet articles and rival makes of bicycle’. In the ‘Good’ list were Robert Burns, Amundsen, and the Raleigh. My family favoured the counterparts from the ‘Bad’ list: Sir Walter Scott (‘would-be aristocrat, eventual bankrupt’), Captain Scott (‘English gent who took ponies, came second, died’), and the BSA. Deep ...”

“... visits to 37 St Giles and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations ...”

“... than two hundred Party-linked or sympathetic periodicals. By far the most successful of these were Robert Blatchford’s Clarion and A.R. Orage’s New Age. The Clarion’s pitch was working-class and almost aggressively non-intellectual – entirely unlike anything Shaw or the Webbs might wish to emulate. If the early Statesman had a model, it was the ...”

“... styles. Cary’s pioneering version of 1805 was predominantly Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric ...”

“... briefly as matches. The weariness of the book is appropriate to a novel about middle age, and it may be part of Baker’s photorealism to respect the inarticulacy of the mind. But consciousness is here treated as an errant and frightening creature to be kept on a very short rein, and it is tempting to see in this the still chastening effect of The ...”

“... for One of Ours, and what Cather called ‘love letters’ from young men struck by the September-May romance of A Lost Lady. And she lived, according to some posthumous critics, as a closeted homosexual. Cather had many potential reasons for forbidding publication of her letters. Willa Cather in New Hampshire in 1917. Reading them suggests a more ...”

“... not the hider, who is doing the counting. ‘Doesn’t it annoy you a little,’ Bishop asked Robert Lowell, ‘when people hand you back, like an obligation, flat statements of what you “meant”?’ Colm Tóibín avoids this temptation. On Elizabeth Bishop is an engaging introduction to her life and work, and also an essay on the importance of her ...”

“... to constructing – or manipulating – cabinet support, before announcing the application in May 1967. The announcement created an expectation of devaluation, worsening the problems created by yet another downturn in the balance of payments. By October, the Treasury believed that devaluation was inevitable. It was finally conceded in November, with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... courtroom, but the case that really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a pistol at George III as he was blowing a kiss to his subjects from the royal box. There was no question that Hadfield had acted with deadly intent. He had loaded his pistols carefully and aimed like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... concerned with the seemingly deep issue Schrödinger discussed. The pioneers of molecular biology may have imported analytical attitudes and techniques from the physical sciences, but they were problem-solvers, working at the laboratory bench to tease out the mechanism of heredity. Perutz, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”