“... Manning wished his biographer to be J.E.C. Bodley, Sir Charles Dilke’s private secretary, but he may well not have said so to Purcell. Yet, with every allowance made, Purcell does seem to have behaved in a manner that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater that he was the ...”

“... he hopes that ‘the time, travel and intellectual stimulation that my present position gives me may expand the space for critical thought more than the privileges I enjoy erode it.’ John Hall, now at the University of Southampton, read history at Oxford but was seduced (his word) by Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy into ...”

“... than Leonard Bast, low-class, anxious for promotion, fearful that he might drop into the Abyss. It may have come as a relief from all these ironies when Forster connected with PC Daley in the Twenties – for Daley was a working-class man, quite as cultivated and artistic as Leonard Bast, but not at all anxious for promotion, quite happy with the Abyss, where ...”

“... generations of students to the engaged prose of the great periodicals of the 19th century, and may help to enable the concern with German letters to re-enter the mainstream of English literary history where it so richly belongs. Those who have read Mrs Ashton’s thesis (from which this book derives) may regret that much ...”

“... chapter. However, later remarks in unconnected conversations have given me to think that there may have been a deeper motive: as an avowed homosexualist with an extensive and curious knowledge of medical/military affairs in Cairo in the First World War, Monck (and not alone in that generation) had some kind of needle about the virtual sanctification of ...”

“... compare this with ‘A Satyr on Charles II’: His sceptre and his prick are of a length And she may sway the one who plays with th’other. Riotous behaviour like smashing up the King’s sundial may perhaps be regarded as undergraduate fun. But such frolics could lead on occasion to murder, whether in a duel or in ...”

“... cage whence the winged heart escapes into Copernican infinity.’ The general principle which we may adduce from her essays on Bruno, culminating in her Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), is that what is important in charting the history of thought is not only (or even primarily) the superficial characteristics of the ideas adopted – whether ...”

“... self-appointed superhuman status is nowhere justified by the play. In a materialist sense this may be true, but ‘we cannot but admire the temerity with which Mr Mason offers clusters of the most mind-ravishing quotations as a logical part of his indictment ... The play is not only about “infatuation”, it is actually written as from a consciousness of ...”

“... Chinese, it does not even label ‘free’ and ‘bound’ morphemes or show which compounds may be split by insertions in certain contexts, and which may not. Nor does the Pinyin show the effect of neighbouring tones on each other, which makes it an unreliable guide to pronunciation. Somewhat primitive ...”

“... are to be explained as deliberate: there is a series of secret Polish puns, and unidiomatic speech may signal moments of narrative turbulence, when the story is saying more than it appears to be. Earlier there is a famous instance of this kind of thing in Lord Jim: the significance of Stein’s parable (‘A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who ...”

“... is a Common Cause beyond the Borders. Even after some reverses in the General Election and in the May local elections, Labour is still the dominant party in Scotland (though with a support comparable to that enjoyed by the Tories in Ukania). The message of the General Election was an ambiguous one for Labour. It enforces the tactic of calling (yet again) for ...”

“... town would have brought Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird to mind. Now, the novel’s appeal may have more to do with our conflicting feelings about the trial and how it should have been conducted. In Guterson there are no lecherous journalists chasing exclusives or high-powered lawyers negotiating film rights. The sessions do not take place under the ...”

“... much re-evaluation of authors has taken place, and such a toppling of old hierarchies, that they may be surprised by what they find: a sophisticated Plautus, a refined Ennius, a serious Ovid, a joky Tacitus, an obscene Horace, an ironic Juvenal. Silver Latin is no longer debased and comedy no longer read only for the laughs. Cicero and Livy, less fashionable ...”

“... Those who have visited the House of Lords as tourists may remember a notice entreating them not to sit on the Woolsack. Nobody at all will remember a light novel of thirty years ago in which the hero, detained in the Palace of Westminster for contempt of Parliament, was found on the Woolsack passionately entwined with his girlfriend ...”

“... question is why both men and women should conspire in the claim that it is a feminine matter. We may feel that a particular garment is in its nature masculine or feminine, despite knowing that at another period it had the opposite connotation. Think of the associations trousers and skirts have, though trousers are now unisex and skirts originally represented ...”