“... Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is probably the cleverest and certainly the most versatile French historian of our day. Beginning with his thèse on the peasants of Languedoc in Early Modern times, he has ranged back to the everyday life of 14th-century heretics and forward to computers studies of 19th-century conscripts ...”

“... surely be central to architecture – like justice to law or health to medicine. The point is a strong one, and Professor Rybczynski duly piles it on. Bitterly deprived by his own education, he can only write from a position of ‘ignorance’. As he sets out to discover the ‘meaning of comfort’, he is at pains to differentiate his own ecological ...”

“... As Ruth Richardson argues in her original anatomy of the Anatomy Acts, sentiment had always run strong throughout society against the desecration of the corpse. Popular piety went in awe of the shades of the departed, while traditional Christian orthodoxy decreed that bones should lie in holy ground awaiting the Last Trump. The rich treated their dead as ...”

“... Labour votes and Labour seats. Hence our behaviour during the long gestation period between Roy Jenkins’s Dimbleby Lecture call for a realignment of the ‘radical centre’ and the establishment of the Council for Social Democracy 15 months later. We differed sharply over our tactics. Some of us – notably Colin Phipps and Michael Barnes – thought ...”

“... 1981, and the launch of the manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the electoral system ...”

“... a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in 18th-century England. In those days Oxford offered the Eternal Club, the Jelly Bag Society, or the Town Smarts, whose members decked themselves out in white ...”

“... This is the third and last volume of Roy Fuller’s memoirs, and it takes him up to the end of the war. It may sound ungracious, but I can’t help wondering why I find all three books so appealing that the strong implication of finality seems quite unacceptable. Though literate and pleasantly, even amusingly morose, these are not what are commonly called compulsive reads ...”

“... of single-parent families, easily colour historians’ readings. The other temptation is equally strong – to romanticise the metropolitan masses as Cockney sparrows or street-wise, bolshie rebels, engaged in an endless rearguard action against exploitation and embourgeoisement. Vindications of working-class ‘honour’ along these lines used to be ...”

“... Fifteen or 20 per cent for the Liberal Democrats at the next election, together with a continuing strong base in local government? It would be a poor reward for his career, especially when the potential support for a party of the centre-left continues to grow, sustained by economic and social trends. For many members of the newly-born SDP – both political ...”

“... has a good deal of truth in it. One cannot read a page of Kafka without feeling that there is a strong religious sensibility at work, allied to the kind of violent honesty of which no more than a handful of writers are capable in any generation. Nevertheless, those who had come to know and love the works must have felt uneasy with this view, and here and ...”

“... just of nature but of human powers. Increasing internal social stratification enabled the rich and strong to seize the benefits of a larger cake. Latterly, precisely as happened in Ireland in the age of the Great Famine, colonialism has replicated this process on a global scale, with the developed nations creating underdevelopment. Komlos’s more optimistic ...”

“... crisis has reinforced Labour’s chronic debility, so far the SDP has been able to thrive upon it. Roy Jenkins talked of an experimental aircraft in adumbrating the idea of a centre party in the early summer of 1980: a ‘dangerously caricaturable analogy’, as he admits in a retrospective comment in The Rebirth of Britain. He said then that it ‘might well ...”

“... installation currently give the Hayward Gallery an of-our-own-time presence. But the paintings by Roy Lichtenstein which line the walls – the early ones anyway – are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz.* The general effect of the show is ...”

“... alone – and those areas in which Aids first became epidemic. These, he maintains, provide strong circumstantial support for the OPV/Aids hypothesis. For the ‘contaminated vaccine’ inference to hold water a further point must be established. The zoonotic jump from SIV to HIV is feasible only in respect of transmission from chimpanzees, not ...”

“... Mark is ‘based on the true story of a real family and is the first of a trilogy’. Written by Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the narrative opens at Christmas 1931, with a chapter about ‘Father’ Frederick Roy Hattersley, a Catholic priest about to leave orders and marry Enid Brackenbury. Who’s ...”