“... with flashbacks to events of the night before. ‘Call yourself a New Puritan?’ the reader may well indignantly ask, but this isn’t really breaking Rule No.5, because the flashbacks are actually occurring in the narrative’s present in the narrator’s hungover memory (and, as if further mitigation were necessary, one of his drinks was spiked with ...”

“... act in the conviction that what you are doing is right, regardless of any empirical evidence that may convince other people it is not right, good faith becomes a purely private matter, a state of mind inaccessible to investigation by committees, unless we were to have one drawn from the Institute of Psychiatry, rather than Butler’s cosy quintet of Right ...”

“... than art, offer a commentary on cultural, political and economic relations. But while they may on the surface seem to say pretty clearly what the makers and buyers thought of each other, they are, at another level, enigmatic. Views from Africa, a very small, very engaging exhibition at the British Museum until 24 July, displays a selection from a rich ...”

“... and black beside the pale-rose tint he’s given to particles of water drying on a letter, 6th May 1947, This is the glass in which I drink the fresh and perfumed wine of Alsace à ta santé. Tous les jours que tu n’es pas ...”

“... she herself didn’t have the word ‘scene’. She had the word ‘crowd’ instead. ‘It may seem very strange to every one nowadays that before this time Matisse had never heard of Picasso and Picasso had never met Matisse. But at that time every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd.’ This theory lies ...”

“... New York, though well-educated. A rapid marriage to a fellow student resulted in an abortion which may have left her unable to have children; there was a powerful Yiddisher momma inside her which displaced itself on the family of worshippers she both needed and resented. After getting in touch with Graves on literary business, she rapidly took in his ...”

“... time-scales, arise within any movement set to challenge hegemonies from the margins. This may be peculiarly true for women, since their life-span can be made to seem fractured and discontinuous, measured as it is by their servicing role within a male economy. And then women’s needs differ so markedly at different ages. I joined the Labour Party in ...”

“... were more congenial (a Japanese official actually said that). This, whatever some apologists may say, is not the same as ignorant American views of foreigners or Mrs Thatcher’s jingoistic talk about Victorian values. (These values can be shared by, say, Leon Brittan, even though his ancestors were hardly of ‘pure’ English stock.) The difference is ...”

“... This presupposition is, of course, built into the electoral laws of democratic states: children may not vote, nor may retarded people, nor may animals. Modern democracies are ruled, in effect, by an educational or intellectual élite – consisting of sane adult human beings who have ...”

“... Football: ‘It was the most democratic game and the most international. By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished.’ On the subject of birth control few would quarrel with his memorable advice: ‘The historian should bear in mind that between about 1880 and 1940 or so, he has on his hands a frustrated ...”

“... Newland’s collection, Eric Helleiner is suitably cautious about the power this confers. Japan may have more leverage over its borrowers than the Saudis had after the first oil-price rise in 1973. But it has much less than the United States was able to exert throughout the Fifties and Sixties. If there is a power in Japan’s new economic ...”

“... that stays NEWS”. READ him: Read HIM.’ The capitalisation is very much of the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed him at the head of the ‘Men of 1914’, and chronicled in elegiac terms his lifelong struggle to reanimate a ...”

“... go popular, that we go American, with threats that if we do not we shall be labelled, as the case may be, cold, academic or parochial. Since the Forties, various translators have put pressure on us to share, even emulate, the feelings of East Europeans who have had a wider and harsher political experience than ourselves. Yes, these are the squalls that have ...”

“... or quasi-coalition regimes beholden to Moscow.’ If that was indeed the intention – and it may well have been – there would have been little objection to it on the part of Russia’s wartime allies, who in 1945 were in no mood to peer too closely behind a semi-respectable democratic façade. A policy of ‘Finlandisation’ in East and Central Europe ...”

“... for strong-mindedness: his own was the one person Genghiz had feared and respected.) Kitbuga may have been inspired to try playing David at Goliath’s Spring: at any rate he attacked the Sultan (who inspired his own soldiers with the cry of ‘O Islam’) without the usual Mongol craft and precaution, and lost his army and his life. Had Hulagu been able ...”