“... years since the so-called London Journal 1762-1763 created its naughty little sensation. Only one more is due in the present series (there is a Research Edition too, but that is another and longer story), which will take us to his death, aged 54, in 1795. Perhaps the strut is becoming a waddle. The self-absorption and mediocrity of mind remain unabated, but ...”

“... densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters. It has some occasional irritants, an ...”

“... Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of ...”

“... for decades provided Gissing materials and support to other scholars, but Delany is the first in more than 25 years to produce a full-scale biography, and the first to engage in an all-out struggle to come to terms with Gissing the man, leaving the novels to play useful supporting roles. If the misery threatens to become contagious, it is not for lack of ...”

“... place the headquarters of the two institutions in Washington, where he feared they would function more as appendages of the American state than as truly international bodies, but their location in the American capital was all but a fait accompli, requiring only a handful of votes from the odd array of allies the US had assembled at the meeting. Keynes’s ...”

“... twelve perhaps. He was always doing things like that. He liked gardening and wanted me to partake more fully of its pleasures. After his teaching obligations of the spring term at Berkeley ended every year, he would apply himself to his own small garden, sheltered and south-east facing. He seemed to enjoy organising and cultivating his little patch of ...”

“... into his stride he was insisting he had a better degree than his opponent, a bigger house, a more beautiful wife, taller children and – definitive proof of his fitness to govern – thicker semen. This was too much, even for Ecuadorians long used to the macho exaggerations of the Latin American stump. The electorate woke up, laughed themselves silly ...”

“... of conspicuously precious materials and designed, as he puts it deliciously, to ‘chirrup’. Thomas Nashe characteristically pushes Marlowe’s conceit still further, describing in The Unfortunate Traveller the internal mechanism of a whole forest full of shrill-breasted artificial birds: Who, though they were bodies without souls, and sweet-resembled ...”

“... concern with Jenner as heroic scientist. An alternative view of the life emerges if one takes a more critical look at the factual evidence available. Fisher makes no attempt to analyse how Jenner manoeuvred himself through potentially adverse circumstances to a position of maximum advantage, and reveals himself as a sophist of some excellence in his ...”

“... The Rodney King four would be tried by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into the King trial, and every minute of ...”

“... towards TVEI (Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative), will represent one of the more remarkable pedagogic reversals of our time. The privileged place which the new curriculum gives (in my opinion, quite rightly) to British history is in singular contrast to the implosion which has taken place in English studies, and the abandonment – now ...”

“... changing paradigms. In the latter instance, the debate has been carried on within the Institute by Thomas Kuhn, who first described scientific revolutions in terms of ‘paradigm shifts’, and Dudley Shapere, who has tried to rescue the notion of objective truth, never complete but seen more and ...”

“... every speech Blum made was interrupted by cries from the extreme Right, all of them coming down more or less to the two words: sale Juif. For the moment, we can pass over this distasteful episode in our history: anti-semitism is now taboo in France, at least in intellectual and political circles, and such incidents would be inconceivable today. Blum was ...”

“... in an academic historian being voiced in Britain? The answer to this question seems to me far more interesting than trying to write the sort of conventional review for which I am palpably the wrong person. I prefer to enquire why such differences between the Continent and this country exist and to examine the work of Finley against the historiographic ...”

“... danceHeard they crowded the floorCouldn’t face it without youDon’t get around much any more.And then, going back almost to the beginning, there was the matter of those initials on the dedication page of The City and the Pillar. This homoerotic drama, Vidal’s second novel, won him attention and execration in about equal measure. The dedicatee was ...”