“... career had been unusual. He began his working life at 17 as an Admiralty clerk, but was excited by Henry Morley’s extension lectures into spending all his spare time on the study of English literature. At the age of 42 he left the Civil Service, where he felt his life was being wasted, to take up his first academic post, a lectureship under Morley at ...”

“... catalogue point of view, the subject might well seem to have been exhausted ... Yet how few there be amongst all these works (as some of us know to our cost) that properly and worthily inculcate the profitable exercise of travel ... Say what you will, the great majority of them are so dreadfully infected with stodgy commercialism, so monumentally useful, that ...”

“... and what society should do about it – have never been polled in Britain, but not everybody can be right to feel on the defensive (even though the arithmetic of opinions is complicated by people’s ability to hold inconsistent views: for example, as to whether local social services are insufficiently vigilant, or too ...”

“... James, in this sensible, not too long life, answers with as much moderation and dispassion as can be asked for. He strikes no pose: Arabist, Zionist, Regular Army, anti-Army, Lawrentian or anti-Lawrentian. The book is a steady climb by the South Coll, rather better in its earlier chapters about the boy and scholar and on ...”

“... of the last few years Britain has not had industrial relations, at least not that the public would be aware of. ‘Industrial relations’ to most of us connotes strike unreasonable trade unions – all that is understood by the ‘Seventies’. We have repeatedly told pollsters that unions had too much power and were ...”

“... years in Italy, in Australia, in New Mexico and Mexico, and so on. There are also numerous memoirs by people such as Jessie Chambers, Helen Corke, Catherine Carswell, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge, a pair of gay Danes, and of course Frieda Lawrence, who knew the novelist at various times in various parts of the world. (There are naturally books also about ...”

“... his company Lonrho were allowed to take over the Observer and Today newspapers, was once denounced by a Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. Tom Bower has now written books about both men which prove both charges a hundred times over. Maxwell was so infuriated by Bower’s book ...”

“... journals, everything from death certificates to poems. There is much to enjoy too, as there would be in any lively historical novel, past or present. But the eulogy pronounced by the great Simon Schama, author of Citizens, calls for comment: ‘A dazzling achievement,’ he writes, ‘an extraordinary story told ...”

“... in hand when the one she wanted was still in the bush. Everyone had expected their marriage to be a disaster. It was and it wasn’t. ‘Saturday,’ Ms Skelton tells us, ‘was the gayest day of the week.’ In the morning they shopped, then they had lunch, then they quarrelled. After that, they did some more shopping, went to the cinema, had supper and ...”

“... the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by Duccio, with a huge nimbus around her head, and called the image The Child Enthroned. Concurrently, the Swiss Ferdinand Hodler celebrated the birth of his son with an equally awed work, The Chosen One, in which the newborn and naked baby lies on the ground ...”

“... not on the backbenches, where a young socialist’s revolutionary determination is often toughened by being passed over for high office, but in high office itself. Indeed, the higher the office Tony Benn occupied, the more his eyes were opened to the horror of capitalist society, and to the impotence of socialists in high office to change it. This unique ...”

“... myth and what Stuart Hampshire calls its ‘fallacy of false fixity’ – that relations cannot be other than they are – is exposed. This is not to say that new fixed entities are never then proposed to replace the myth. Plato’s divisions of the soul and their reflection in the state, the liberals’ titles rooted in first possession, the ...”

“... appear during 1988, and despite publication dates close to 11 November only one of these seems to be a largely opportunistic production. The reasons for such persistent attention are plain. The war was a huge rupture in many areas of human experience. It caused the fall of empires, dynasties and governments, the transformation of many institutions, and the ...”

“... the study of art and literature, especially the art and literature of the Renaissance, seems to be taking a historical turn in the Eighties. To a historian like myself this trend is obviously encouraging. Indeed, for a historian the problem is not so much to explain the rise of the so-called ‘New Historicism’ associated with Stephen Greenblatt and his ...”

“... about ten years ago (Betrayed, starring Debra Winger and Tom Berenger) he was laughed to scorn by the mainstream critics, who diagnosed a bad case of Euro-Marxist condescension towards the nightmare side of the American dream. There were no big funds available to law-enforcement agencies to track down the violent Right, as there would have been if the ...”