“... is on those who would go beyond Schumpeter’s minimal and uninspiring position. There are four major ideals of democracy that seem to have a hold on the popular imagination. Let us see what ‘more democracy’ might mean in each of these four senses. First, suppose that by ‘more democracy’ we mean increasing the fit between majority opinion and public ...”

“... rare and small-scale occurrences, swept traditional proletarian regions this summer, and won major concessions from the authorities. In short, public opinion, until now merely a potential ally for the reform movement, has become a force in its own right. And for the first time since his election as General Secretary in March 1985, Gorbachev has begun to ...”

“... nothing but a neat reversal of the story of Lolita.’ And it explains why incest is the ‘major theme’ in the subsequent fiction. Another major theme is that of the ‘bend sinister’ or bastardy, and Field has an ancestral explanation for that, as well. He ventilates with some relish the court and family rumours ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... his father (murdered) most of his family dispersed into various exiles’. Nabokov was the only major writer of the century to have fled both Communism and Nazism; his life had its share of dispossessions and close escapes. Bolshevik machine guns were strafing the harbour in Sebastopol when the Nabokovs left Russia for the last time. Twenty-one years ...”

“... and lord treasurer, and left an enormous body of papers. His correspondence, now dispersed in four major and a number of minor collections, dominates the political history of Elizabeth’s reign. Even more important, in some respects, are the unique series of memoranda written in his distinctive, neat and spidery hand. They range from scribbled notes from ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”

“... and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago, the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the more magisterial pronouncement that his ...”

“... always turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing ...”

“... never heard him utter a harsh word.’ Admirers and antagonists agree that, more than any other major literary critic, Leavis’s influence was exerted through teaching. His classes were mostly devoted to the close analysis of particular passages, the purpose being to detect sincerity, vitality – as Byatt has it, ‘authenticity’. Leavis owed much to ...”

“... Geoffrey Parker’s new book on the Thirty Years’ War is the first major study of the subject to appear in English for nearly half a century. To be more exact, it is now 47 years since the publication of a book on the war by C.V. Wedgwood, as she was then. That graceful and perceptive study – a remarkable achievement for a 28-year-old historian – remains an example of traditional narrative history at its formal best ...”

“... a chilling subject-matter fixed with a steady eye, The Witches of Eastwick through the potency of John Updike’s imaginative release. On the Perimeter records what Caroline Blackwood found at Greenham Common and in the town of Newbury, when she visited the nuclear protest encampments there in March this year, shortly before the town council attempted to ...”

“... pleased to be included in the massive antitrust lawsuit brought by the US government against 17 major Wall Street firms for colluding to maintain high fees for securities underwriting. Not to have been on the list would have implied that the firm was of little significance. Very occasionally, Goldman Sachs made a splash by landing some extraordinary ...”

“... John Kennedy was killed 25 years ago, on 22 November 1963. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known familiarly as the Warren Commission, issued its report a little less than a year later. In the report, members of the commission allowed that certain questions remained unanswered, but their conclusion left no room for doubt: ‘The commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy ...”

“... Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this ...”