“... other major French writer of that century or this; even Zola, stodgy, paunchy bourgeois though he may have been, at least pitchforked himself into the Dreyfus Affair. But Stendhal never really brought off anything – except, of course, the novels. We watch him drifting and coasting along, dependent on high-placed, energetic patrons like the aforementioned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... say he were a simple man, but none of us can say that any more.’ There are, as these passages may have made apparent, two voices muttering in the shadows behind Kennaway’s prose, and they are the Old Firm of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You can hear Hemingway grumbling in the rhythm of the faux-naif opening; it could be Colonel Cantwell muttering to ...”

“... in the summer of 1533, she was six months pregnant, and it is not unreasonable to think that she may have found the lengthy and elaborate ceremonies exhausting, but we’re told that ‘never had she loved life so much.’It is frustrating, too, that Hunting the Falcon doesn’t make more space for a consideration of the historical debate. There has been ...”

“... on bail are being given court dates in 2029. Victims and defendants are in limbo: the guilty ones may well think they’ve got away with it. Witnesses’ memories fade; some are no longer willing to engage with the process. It is an intolerable state of affairs. The number of defendants remanded in custody pending trial almost doubled between 2018 and ...”

“... the government appears to be entertaining the expansion of its nuclear weapons programme. In May the MoD suggested that the number of full-time army personnel might be increased from its current figure of 72,500 to 76,000 soldiers. But the SDR recommended no increase, though it did recognise ‘a strong case for a small increase in regular numbers when ...”

“... that it has no hope of reforming society, there is no useful point in the enterprise. Results it may well have, but bad ones. The trouble most Britons experience is not in telling a masculine ‘he’ from a generic ‘he’ but in telling ‘he’ from ‘him’ (‘He said it was to be kept between he and I’). Rapped by pedants and yet subjected to ...”

“... then necessarily the continuing internal conflict, can be seen as interconnected. Such a theory may now be in sight. Its basis is the progressive unification of economics and ecology. It is not industrial production as such which has led to these major contradictions. That is the weakest side of the ecology movement, which has correctly identified current ...”

“... a Lark cigarette from this Tiffany box. Here. I’ll light it for you with my Dunhill.’ ‘May I have this dance, Lady Darlene? I am the Earl of Grant ford.’ ‘Indeed you may, Earl, honey. I am Lady Darlene.’ There are even touches of Gracie (or is it Woody?) Allen:   ‘Was your father weak, passive, absent ...”

“... with another over a period of many years, is in fact unlikely to be repeated here. A better guide may well be Canada, which has experienced no fewer than six minority governments since 1957 and, be it noted, is none the worse for that. What will probably happen when next the Conservative and Labour Parties both fail to win a majority is that the larger will ...”

“... his natural medium. ‘I do not think that people want love most,’ he writes in his Journal (12 May 1946): ‘they need the settled reveries, the calm testing and tasting of their past and the world’s past ... I am talking about “people” when I mean “me”.’ It surprised Welch very much when he found himself sharing a successful ménage with the ...”

“... its deeper meaning – just what Freud predicted would happen in the United States.’ Bettelheim may well have earned an attitude of self-assurance, but it is astonishing how he turns a subtle and difficult issue into one that is unambiguously straightforward. No less a historian of ancient culture than Jean-Pierre Vernant has written that ‘there is no ...”

“... own to dismiss as prejudiced, Utopian, sentimental and counter-productive every suggestion he may venture to make about what ought to be done. For this, the most effective technique – perhaps the only technique which can even hope to be effective – is to make such people ask themselves how they would react if they had to live the lives that the poor ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”