“... the New Review saw in it the ‘whole waterlogged English class system’ sinking under its own weight. But the system has proved remarkably buoyant. Old Etonians and alumni of the Bullingdon Club continue to thrive. By contrast their antagonists of forty years ago, the police and the press, have fared less well. This side of the Stephen Lawrence case and ...”

“... The result of the superinfections, even if they can be controlled with drugs, is to compound a weight loss which is severely weakening; one doctor describes the patient with AIDS as looking like a prisoner in a concentration camp. This feebleness in turn exposes him to quiescent infections acquired outside the hospital, to infections from his indigenous ...”

“... wrapped up in one neat package so intricately knotted that we can pick it up, feel its weight and then chuck it in the back of the drawer where it belongs. We might judge the final episode of Cold Lazarus an appropriate moment to draw a line under self-referential fiction, raise our glasses to Dennis Potter for providing a good deal of entertaining ...”

“... not having tried to edit out of his earlier poems views which he later regretted, is carrying the weight of those developing arguments. There are critics who have found anti-semitism in the ‘Burial of the Dead’ section of The Waste Land, and in the phrase ‘sapient sutlers’ in ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, but where a more polemical writer ...”

“... father and deeply felt sketches of social and financial precariousness. Sterne’s rich Uncle Richard, with whom he had boarded, had given him a sight of privilege without its possession. His uncle’s son, also Richard, befriended his impecunious cousin and helped fund him through his time at Jesus ...”

“... of Shakespeare’s career and in different sorts of scene each of these pressures has a different weight, and it takes great critical delicacy – of a kind which has much in common with that of a theatre director or a conductor – to determine exactly how they press against each other. Shakespeare also frequently melted strands of imagery together so that ...”

“... not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’. Why then, given all this – the concise argument, the weight of the evidence, the unmistakable practical purpose of the authors – does the book still feel oddly utopian? Part of the problem, I think, is that the argument is not as straightforward as its authors would like. Despite their obvious sense of ...”

“... who is living it or to those around him. Dworkin recalls the words of the princes’ murderer in Richard III:                                                We smothered The most replenished sweet work of nature, That from the prime creation e’er she framed. At the same time, we cherish the fact that a life ...”

“... A sentimental glow surrounds the Emancipation Proclamation, but in fact, as the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, it possessed all the ‘moral grandeur of a bill of lading’. It contained no criticism of slavery and did not free all slaves; the legal status of at least 800,000 slaves was not affected. The proclamation did not free those held ...”

“... renewal of the traditional city as the 20th century disastrously demonstrated.’ That is a lot of weight for two blocks of luxury flats to carry. Anxious to work out where the rot started, they follow the interwar mansion blocks placed on Prince Albert Road along the northern edge of Regent’s Park – one of their more surprising inclusions – as they ...”

“... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...”

“... the time that Erasmus was writing, he had already put into words the Tudor image of a villainous Richard III. Though this was not printed either in English or in Latin until after his death, the work may once have been intended as an aid to the consolidation of the dynasty into whose service he had entered. Here was one kind of political activity, besides ...”

“... Draper staring into space, Draper sending his secretary-cum-copywriter Peggy home with an electric weight-loss belt to see what it does (predictably, it’s a vibrator; the proposed slogan is ‘You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel’) – is desultory, and distracts only a little from the soap opera antics of bed-hopping and keeping secrets. It was ...”

“... of writing from the US that the then editor Bill Buford labelled ‘dirty realism’, taking in Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Bobbi Ann Mason and so on), has always belonged to her and her alone. ‘For me,’ she has written, this ‘no man’s land, a deeply specific isolation drenched in family stories and secrets, is a huge advantage for a ...”

“... excess. His friend the racial theorist, eugenicist and future ill-fated minister of agriculture Richard Walther Darré wrote Race: The New Nobility of the Blood and the Soil at his estate near Jena. Both belonged to the primitive, woodworking, neo-peasant, maypole-hugging ideological left of the NSDAP, in which broad church they were about as distant from ...”