“... authoritative fretfulness has been part of the problem for would-be MacNeice biographers: they may have felt that the territory had already been well-mapped by its original proprietor. They may also have feared, from consulting the one or two memoirs put out by MacNeice’s acquaintances, that there was too daunting a ...”

“... and Pietà are, I think one must agree, clearly intended to suggest large erections, which may have been intended to symbolise Resurrection. The purpose of these displays, it is conjectured, was to celebrate the Incarnation – though Steinberg prefers the obsolete term ‘humanation’. God became an entire man, and therefore a sexual being; his ...”

“... depth in English political fictions, when these are compared with works of European origin, may be due to the fact that the English simply lack any experience of the totalitarian state: ‘The special world created by secret-police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved ...”

“... Revolutionary empire’ is a bold term which may be taken in various senses. Like the Roman and Arab before it, but on a grander scale, the British Empire was a powerful force in drawing peoples out of their separate existences, pulling the world together into one jarring and explosive whole. Its expansion had transforming effects on Britain itself, and through it on Europe ...”

“... inscriptions increasingly unintelligible to the modern inhabitants: visited occasionally, it may be, as a pissoir, a species of visit naturally brief. It is wicked to quote this delicious paragraph, one of the many that can be quoted, if only because it is so supremely quotable, but even more so because its sensational image ...”

“... and, like all such devices, ought to maintain constancy. But it is also part of nature and so it may be affected by the kind of inconstancy that it often claims to detect in the other part which it measures. Wittgenstein in some of his later work was concerned with a fundamental form of this problem. Do the meanings of our words remain stable and unchanged ...”

“... Tebbit said, barring a recession, he could not see Labour being returned again. In that, he may be right. As Peter Jenkins explains, the Labour Party may only be able now to hope for about 35 per cent of the vote. There are fewer trade-unionists and council-house tenants, and the proportion of public-sector employees ...”

“... the Confessor and the Elder literally felt not to count – even though the latter’s mark may still be visible on the shire system of Central England. As for the Egberts and Oswigs and Cerdics, the incompetences of modern spelling have left them all unpronounceable, vaguely ludicrous. To this general picture of neglect and oblivion there is one ...”

“... an interactive game you can play. This is much less exciting than it sounds. The anticlimax may be deliberate, a way of hinting that SIS is many things but Tomb Raider isn’t one of them. In any event, the game turns out to be a bit like a GCSE English comprehension exercise, only easier and with more pictures. You have two minutes to read a ...”

“... respond complacently. But some of them at least respond needfully and in terror. The secularist may despise them for that: but at least their frame mind needs to be acknowledged and sympathetically entered into, as it virtually never is by non-believers. The holiness of Holy Writ cannot of course be proved; and the further scholars probe into the ...”

“... For voters, feelings prevail over beliefs,’ Peter Mandelson writes in The Third Man. ‘People may be torn between their head and their heart, but ultimately it is their gut feeling that is decisive: they vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not necessarily the one who presents the right arguments ...”

“... the case that the way we use such terms as ‘universities’ and ‘higher education’ may, similarly, be best understood as the deployment of an inherited vocabulary without the underlying assumptions that for a long time made sense of it. I am not suggesting that any particular phase of the historical development of such institutions should be ...”

“... side of political life, as well as about the many ways in which individual rationality may be collectively self-defeating. But there is more to politics than individuals acting out of calculated self-interest: both calculation and self-interest may be conspicuously lacking. Consider, for a start, an alternative ...”

“... SDP. Like Suez, which aroused, though very briefly, much the same rage and euphoria, the Falklands may be considered a de-colonial situation: and it is typical of such a situation that the will to possess the islands should rest with Argentina rather than Britain. It has long been generally understood that they would go in the end to Argentina: this remains ...”

“... days afterwards.Meanwhile, the Captain Tom Foundation was incorporated with Companies House on 5 May 2020 and registered with the Charity Commission a month later. According to the application to register the charity, submitted on 13 May, it was being set up by ‘the family of Captain Tom’. It was a busy day for them: a ...”