“... which is so wedded to the application of neoclassical economic theory that it cannot accommodate more diverse modes of human behaviour, that it assumes a static, equilibrium economy when its real concern is with change over time, and which presupposes perfect competition, full utilisation of resources, rational and profit-maximising entrepreneurs, and ...”

“... is with us still. Even the clergyman who performed the service was soon disillusioned. The Rev. Thomas Noel had been promised some ‘substantial’ token of the groom’s appreciation. He received instead one of the rings of which Byron kept a plentiful supply to distribute to admirers. Noel was used to disappointment. An illegitimate cousin of ...”

“... letters (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Herbert, Donne, Marvell, Fielding, Coleridge, Joyce, Orwell, Dylan Thomas), had in his view found ways to resist religious conformity (religion and politics for Empson are virtually inextricable from each other). They give voice to the personal conflicts of their times, not to their resolutions. But they do not endorse the ...”

“... correspondence: ‘Between December 1946 and April 1984, Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones more than 1421 letters and 521 postcards: about 7500 surviving pages.’ (Larkin also generally wrote to his mother twice a week, but those letters remain unpublished; they might convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting ...”

“... economic output had dropped by a quarter. The unemployment rate hovered at around 25 per cent, more than three times the pre-crisis level. About 22 per cent of the population suffered from what the European statistics agency defines as ‘severe material deprivation’ – the inability to pay mortgage or rent payments, or to afford things like a washing ...”

“... By spring 1940 France and Britain had been at war with Germany for more than six months; Belgium was already occupied by the Nazis. On 9 June some fifty divisions Of the German Army under von Rundstedt, a commander so formidable that even Hitler is said to have treated him with considerable respect, struck southwards from Belgium towards Rheims ...”

“... brightest anthropologists of his generation, he scorned his peers on the way out. ‘I’m both more productive intellectually than they are, and I’m having more fun. It must drive them crazy.’This barb suggests a thick-skinned arrogance that hardly matched the intense, hunched, broken-toothed, clever, boyish, utterly ...”

“... or even the Counter-Reformation. As far as I can tell, our family was completely invisible, no more than a conspiracy of inklings, until my great-grandfather became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after ...”

“... Germans, it was in enemy hands. By then Frank was dead. Beyond the Frontier carefully examines far more confusion than this. But perhaps the most general non-simplicity of all is the way Frank’s talents got him to the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border, and by what military means. Volunteering as an Oxford undergraduate of 19 at the outbreak of war, Frank had ...”

“... of a sort, and a poet and writer of some gifts. To an extent probably greater than his more ‘educated’ antagonist Alger Hiss, he was in thrall to the potency of ideas. And he never doubted his own centrality: his sometimes subjective and at other times objective importance as an instrument of history. He had, in every declension of the word, a ...”

“... It is unfortunate, really, that Schwartz has filtered into the general public’s consciousness more because of the outstanding copy his life has proved for other writers than because of his own work. Saul Bellow’s superb roman à clef, Humboldt’s Gift (1975), was modelled loosely on his relations with Schwartz in the late Forties and early Fifties, and ...”

“... it to his old enemy, Shadwell. A hostile critic would call Dryden an opportunist, but it would be more accurate to say that he is attempting to heal old wounds and soften his ‘stern age’ into peace. Similarly, C. Day Lewis’s translation of the Aeneid (1952) might be regarded as a shrewd strategy by an establishment operator who hoped one day to succeed ...”

“... and appear limitless. ‘A viable view of Wagner research,’ Deathridge concludes, ‘has more to do with the dynamics of history than with an absolute vision of how it should be.’Hence the appearance of the Wagner Handbook and Wagner in Performance, handsome, amply-stocked volumes by many hands, surveying the Wagner phenomenon from numerous, not ...”

“... advertised Matthews’s three-part series from the Sierra Maestra, but his audacious reporting did more than startle readers: it made him one of the most reviled figures in American journalism. He had known controversy before. His dispatches for the Times during the Spanish Civil War were mutilated by his editors, pilloried by his critics and celebrated by ...”

“... his new, original, sublime and sonorous music. Listen with an open mind, and you will feel this more keenly than can be expressed in words.’ Such passages were easier to write at the end of the 18th century than at the beginning of the 21st, especially when the author was a Prague professor of philosophy undoubtedly well schooled in rhetoric. Both Piero ...”