“... become, in effect, a traitor to the cause. I took the latter path, pursuing eccentric interests in Arthur Hugh Clough and George Gissing, and developing a critique of fiction based on a very superficial reading of what I took to be Existentialist ethics, mauvaise foi and all that. For Leavis the study of English was intended to foster the critical ...”

“... When​ George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency ...”

“... Autobiography is the zest with which she writes about her work. ‘I always took pleasure in a little bit of fine writing (afterwards called in the family language a “trot”) ... when I got moved by my subject, and began to feel my heart beat, and perhaps a little water in my eyes ... I have always had my ...”

“... history and Anglo-German relations – on which he is an authority – Rüger gives tantalisingly little space to the islanders themselves. There were a couple of thousand of them. At first they were fishing families; later, as the holidaymakers, poets, soldiers, sailors and spies of Northern Europe came pouring off the steamers, they became part-time ...”

“... any close involvement with tennis. That’s only an impression gathered from the fact that very little of the actual life of the game appears in the book’s pages and from my disappointment that such a gifted writer gives so little of himself in a quasi-inert hotchpotch of selections from here and there. Except for an ...”

“... news of his romance with Jessica Lange, whom he was then partnering in Country, had just broken. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe had caught the headlines in the past, but to get the girl and join the top league of male box-office stars at the same time was a new story. There was much dissection of Shepard’s life-style, the subtleties of his ...”

“... has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick. Yet in this matter as in others the English are not as tolerant as they would like to be thought. Marxist blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’ she wrote to Thackeray the following day. ‘Mr Clough sat at the foot of my sofa with this keen expression of investigation, which I determined not to mind, & only thought him un-understandable ...”

“... what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables them to buff up on their role as guides to the less discerning public. None of this, though, takes into account his sheer fun and his pleasure in (and exasperation ...”

“... ones Sondheim can hear without squirming. He went to Williams College in Massachusetts and acted a little: the part he craved was the young killer in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall. He had to smoke for that role, and continued for decades. After graduating in 1950, he studied with Milton Babbitt. He may have been flirting with thoughts of classical ...”

“... political history can easily seem highly specific, illuminating the past of one state but very little else. But to the extent that we are all blessed or burdened with families, bodies, rituals and class, the stuff of social history and, above all, of cultural history can appear much more widely interesting and relevant. By focusing their energies on these ...”

“... all pamphlets written in England by women in the 1650s were by Quakers. The sect had comparatively little respect for the old ways. To conservatives within the regime, this suggested that the toleration offered in Lambert’s 1653 constitution had gone too far. By late 1656, the Protectorate had reached a crisis. It had always struggled to unite disparate ...”

“... an outlet overseas for all the manly endeavour that would otherwise be unbearably cooped up in one little island. The effect of such novels lasted well into our own century: Graham Greene has written that the stories of Rider Haggard were responsible for his lifelong interest in Africa. But for most children today, James Stephen’s prophecy of a time when ...”

“... born of Boers. He was also, we soon realised, gay. After a while he introduced a young friend, Arthur, who came around with him and learnt his trade, devotedly watching Villiers as he fixed our errant Windows, e-mail and printers. One day Villiers let us down even more badly than usual and I was getting ready to fire him when I ran into my predecessor. You ...”

“... of course, it was often more tetchy, but appearances were decently kept up. No one supposed that Arthur Balfour, that inveterate political animal, was weary of politics when he pulled out in 1911, as he showed by insinuating himself into most of the Cabinets formed during the next twenty years. Like-wise, Austen Chamberlain’s displacement as Conservative ...”