“... for 50p, today, though much leggier than they were and possibly French, they are nearer £10.13 May. On our evening walk we are coming slowly along past the bookshop, me with my stick, when a skateboarder detaches himself from a group of lads and comes for us at high speed. We don’t flinch, though he comes perilously close and fast. R. says, quite ...”

“... contributed to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent ...”

“... and negations in Davie’s art are clearly conditions of their opposite, as a love of country may dictate a refusal to be mindlessly ‘patriotic’. In ‘Middlesex’ Davie tells the story of an English girl met serving beers in a Greek bar: The longer loop their Odysseys, the more Warmly exact the Ithakas they remember: Thus, home she said was ...”

“... text matching internet sources or essays submitted elsewhere – evidence that this student may have used an essay mill or essay bank. A study by the University of Swansea in 2018 found that one in seven students in the UK admitted to using an essay mill. The government has recently pledged to make essay-writing services illegal, but that won’t stop ...”

“... uses and meanings, of course, and we might say the more the better. The lives we imagine for crime may help us to see in it and around it, and thinking about crime may help us to think about other matters. Still, we need a way of managing the profusion, and I am going to suggest three major meanings or reference points for ...”

“... of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on the ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicoloured, gorgeously plumed sea worms carpeting an underlying shoal, or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the ...”

“... In the chapter in The Prince on the savage Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, he says that cruelty may be well or ill matched to its end, ‘se del male è licito dire bene’ – if it’s OK to talk ‘well’ of evil. Macaulay thought that the Pistola manuscript, a morbid account in Machiavelli’s hand of the Florentine plague of 1523, could not have been ...”

“... on paleographic grounds this is assigned to the seventh or eighth century. The cross itself may be older – not as old as St Thomas, as the relics claim to be, but very beautiful and austere. What this unexpected extension of the Thomas story produced in me was not any access of religious feeling but an intense biographical curiosity. His Indian ...”

“... Office, this is by no means a triumphalist volume in celebration of the Conservative Party. It may indeed be the Left which has most to learn from it. The perspective it adopts is very much that of our own day, starting from the premise that the Tories have been in power for the last 16 years – and that this is broadly in keeping with their performance ...”

“... case. That the reader will unquestioningly believe what he is told, and, if told it enough times, may even carry on on Fuegi’s behalf, telling his friends, ‘That Brecht was a nasty piece of work, and he didn’t even write his own plays,’ assumes a rather naive view of reading. It also doesn’t allow for fairness, the English equivalent of ...”

“... that was obliging men to rebuild the entire structure of society on new foundations.’ They may have shared a feeling that aristocratic privilege imposed a duty to provide sound political leadership, and act as intermediaries between the subject and the state, but they interpreted that duty in drastically different ways. Alexis’s intellectual path was ...”

“... and although it is no longer so obsessional and so long-lasting as it could once be, it may still determine the individual outlook more than most care to own. The sense of belonging or not belonging, important for Bloomsbury or for the Brideshead Generation written about by Humphrey Carpenter, is less significant than the initial and basic instinct ...”

“... that we want is discussion, and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be.’ In Liberal vision, the lamp of reason blazes forth to scatter the forces of tradition, obscurantism, convention, violence, deceit, formality, Medieval superstition and unearned privilege. Many of these forces were seen as lurking within the Tory ...”

“... This collection of essays is undeniably a book for academic inmates (if the race of lexicographers may be so described), with a content that only occasionally extends a broad appeal to the friendly layman. Its editor, the distinguished Dr Burchfield, describes it as being ‘Mainly concerned with large historical, period, or regional dictionaries, including ...”

“... had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the rustic poet who in 1804 had been paid nearly £4000 for his two little volumes, he would have ruined his gift but he might have made big money. As it was, his best things are so good because they were not the things he wanted to do. The ...”