“... to explain this phenomenon than E.P. Thompson himself. But his most recent book (or, more accurately, his hastily-assembled hodgepodge of pamphlets, letters, rejoinders, poems and memoirs) is not an exercise in explanation: it is an exercise in self-indulgence. As a political statement, it adds relatively little to Thompson’s last collection of ...”

“... than the sword, the sharpest pen is surely the cartoonist’s: one palpable hit from him will do more than months of routine pounding from lumbering leader-writers. This may be common knowledge. But is it true? After all, media experts of every hue – and not just those who see the press as the poodle of the powerful – have long been questioning the ...”

“... the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election rhetoric: the loser’s speech of concession, the victor’s magnanimous reply, and the President’s Inaugural Address. This double-edged requirement reflects a traditional tension between the fear that the country is winding ...”

“... Only Lawrence, Larkin’s earliest ‘touchstone against the false’, survives more or less intact. It would be easy enough, then, to argue that – fun and games aside – the really important revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon and recluse, the arch-self-deprecator, was in truth nursing a champ-sized ...”

“... There has never been a ‘Pacificism’ to go with Orientalism, the South Seas having always seemed more luscious than mysterious. The obligations felt by the ‘civilised’ to turn South Sea islanders into something else was too strong for there to be any thought of learning from them, and scholarly encounters seemed a little too hedonist to be serious ...”

“... succeeding generations a legacy of bloodshed and civil strife. Others read in the King’s fate a more personal message. ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ the ageing Queen Elizabeth demanded, mindful of her fallen favourite, the Earl of Essex, and his forlorn attempt to rally support for his claim to the throne by staging the tragedy of Richard’s ...”

“... is a remarkable book. I told him it was. Another says I am a conceited prig. I have said as much more than once. A third hints at the writer’s inherent madness. I queried the same possibility.’ When they learned that the death notice was false, critics were aggrieved. But it wasn’t a cheap trick to gain sympathy. Barbellion hadn’t expected to see the ...”

“... If he sometimes appeals to notions of justice, denouncing the wage-relation as ‘robbery’, he more often dismisses moral ideas as ideological baggage, superstructural fictions by which our rulers aim to sweeten their sovereignty. There would be no need for justice in a Communist society, since the very concept implies a scarcity which would have been ...”

“... and a slightly older cabal of Newnham and Somerville graduates already had the leadership of the more sensible constitutionalist wing sewn up. The few elected women in local government were usually middle-aged spinsters with impressive records of voluntary work; even when suffrage was granted and a few women entered parliament, they rarely gained admittance ...”

“... at Bielefeld University on the Nazi policy of killing off the mentally ill ascribed the murder of more than a hundred thousand psychiatric patients by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German ...”

“... to describe her), and postwar baby boomers (as I almost was), need I think to place that euphoria more firmly than we did at the time in the context of the Second World War. We were the children of that war. And it was the direness of the 1950s for women, another backlash after the war’s liberating potential, which precipitated the feminism that was to ...”

“... the compliment, writing to Alsop in 1967 that he wished he had Berlin’s stout resolution:I think more and more the truth of Vietnam is in the nearby countries ... I don’t have the wonderful self-confidence of Isaiah – ‘I’m a terrific domino man’ – but I share the feeling that’s where we have done best.There ...”

“... well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy bitter, though, needed to rest for 24 hours before it was broached – something her ladyship could hardly be expected to understand. But if the muddy brown liquid that hiccuped from the spigot would not serve the ...”

“... larger slice of posthumous revenue. But, looked at closely, this apparent generosity takes away more than it gives. Over the last hundred years the royalty enjoyed by British writers during their lifetimes has shrunk from a typical 20 per cent or more to a measly 10 per cent. Since the vast majority of works do not last ...”

“... was his older woman, an exotic foreign dancer of whom we will not be hearing a lot more. The ‘terrible diary’ was the record of his life-experience so far. On the evidence of the diary, Miller would probably always have a Leavis and a Lotte in his life. Leavis could be seen as his reward for teenage virtue, for highmindedness, hard ...”