“... from Sex and Destiny were published recently in the press, which gives a cue for how the book may be used fruitfully. It collapses as a sustained argument, but much is said locally, on its three main themes, that is forceful and convincing. Some excellent roasting, scalding and melting is performed in Chapter Eight on modern ‘sex religion’, and the ...”

“... at those capable of capturing the party for Benn. It has been a successful operation. Tony Benn may be Britain’s first Post-Bourgeois Politician. ‘Post-bourgeois’, a term of art in American political science, describes the politics of the post-industrial society in which acquisitiveness among the increasingly affluent and educated middle classes ...”

“... to his Romantic forbears. The method of the book means that we have to attend to a great deal we may have heard before, such as brief expositions of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Schiller: but it is true enough that the ideology, the pathology and the eschatology of the period under discussion have connections with those thinkers and many others roughly their ...”

“... There was even a romantic tinge to patronage. The two great loves of Balfour’s life were May Lyttelton, whose early death had robbed him of an intended bride, and Mary Wyndham, Lady Elcho. May’s brother Alfred was appointed Colonial Secretary, and Mary’s brother George was brought into the Cabinet. Under ...”

“... The past may be another country, but when we try to study it the problem seems to be not so much that they do things differently as that they give such a different account of what they do. To understand past intellectual activities, in particular, we often have to divide up what for us is a single concern, or bring together issues which we treat as distinct ...”

“... the teasing inventions of Sir Thomas More. More’s vision of the good place which is no place may have been inspired by the voyages of Columbus’s follower Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the coast of Venezuela and, absurdly, managed to adorn with his name both of the continents of the New World. The literary tradition of Utopian landfalls ranges from the ...”

“... known physical phenomena in a single overarching explanatory scheme. Physicists, in other words, may be running out of things to discover. Every bit of evidence, then, points to the conclusion that science, long regarded as the highest and most genuine species of human knowledge, one of the glories of humanity, is nearing a sort of culmination. All of which ...”

“... it, waiting for Jelal and Rüya to return, and carries on the daily column in Jela’s name. Jelal may have good reasons for lying low. He is an essayist and storyteller rather than a political journalist – which is hardly surprising in a country where, then and now, authors can face imprisonment for exercising their right to political ...”

“... driven by the desperate assumption that in co-operating step by step and delivering the many it may be able to save the few. The offices of the Community are a labyrinth of clattering typewriters and cluttered desks and stacked files, relentlessly grinding out their results of classification and alphabetisation and – the barbaric term fits here ...”

“... Whatever may now be the state of the market for A Shropshire Lad, the poetry of A.E. Housman has certainly been among the most read of the 20th century. Or in the 20th century, for the earlier poems belong to the end of the nineteenth. When A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896, it was at the author’s own expense; presumably it did not then look like work that would attract the public ...”

“... on South Island. The stamp bears two strikes of the Picton cancellation of 21 March 1904, which may have served to disguise its rare quality. Where it went then is a mystery. The package and its address have not survived but perhaps it had the distinction of travelling in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine ...”

“... well-known on Fifth Avenue, gets in, with the young Cristina Iglesias as token promise. People may barely notice, because for decades the PNV’s nationalism has been rousingly defined by exclusion rather than inclusion: that is, by opposition to the Spanish state, from which it has wrung juridical and fiscal privileges that other autonomous ...”

“... I have thought of Belfast as a jail surrounded by drab, cold streets. The fact that my sister May has lived congenially enough in Belfast for many years has not altered my impression of the city. I visited her a few months ago and found it as grim as it was in 1939. But my experience of it, I concede, is limited. I stayed away from Belfast during the ...”

“... A patent agent who has spent his time among the open shelves in the old Science Reference Library may fetch up beside a scholar who has worked equally long on manuscripts but has never seen as much as a hundred running feet of them shelved together. There will still be a kind of hierarchy – although you can ask for a general book in the Rare Books Reading ...”

“... Minor anachronisms, on the other hand (as Selbourne points out in the case of the word arguni), may indicate the addition of new information reaching Jacob in Italy, to which he returned in 1273 to write up his adventures. In Jacob’s case, one would have to include here, swallowing hard, the startling ‘Manci’, an opprobrious Mongol-period term which ...”