“... could accept with equanimity the death at sea of several hundred sailors simply because – if I may borrow that phrase – they came from a country with which we were in dispute and which had a tradition of putting up too readily with dictatorial regimes. And if there are those who find it distasteful to talk in the same breath, as though that puts them on ...”

“... Drabble’s three women remain intelligent onlookers, well-meaning but detached. In part, this may be because the novelist is concerned to avoid the kinds of melodramatic resolution which are suggested by her closeness to the 19th-century novel tradition. Liz Headleand, though a psychotherapist, spends most of the novel putting off her need to enquire into ...”

“... need critical evaluation, and we do not find it here. Mr Graves is a biographer, not a critic, and may plead that, in the case of a romantic poet like Housman it is legitimate to make biographical inferences from his poems: but one becomes infuriated by his unvarying assumption that every poem may be related to some incident ...”

“... the two neighbours.’ Professor Brooks admits that this is bad, and agrees that Shakespeare may have agreed to have it changed on the prompt-book, but is certain he wrote it at first, because of the rules invented by Dover Wilson for the misinterpretation of his handwriting. Surely anyone used to correcting proofs knows that all kinds of mistakes ...”

“... it is right to report angry comments made by a colleague about a third person – comments which may have been regretted as soon as made. Should I, for example, now report comments made to me about Barbara by people who, to judge from this book, she thought were her admirers? After all, perhaps they were her admirers, despite momentary irritation. Barbara ...”

“... action, and his lack of responsibility for the failures of Brezhnev’s last years (only in May 1982 did he leave the KGB to return to the Central Committee Secretariat), he was able to win the support of the Politburo majority. This was vital, for the Soviet leadership is composed of a group of powerful men, each heading huge apparatuses, enjoying a ...”

“... face with wide, rather fishy eyes; her thin limbs are splayed out with flapperish elegance. It may be that her attractions – a fat bundle of love-letters was destroyed when she died, and Mrs Colenbrander finds several witnesses to testify to her ‘aura’ – had less to do with ideal beauty than with loquaciousness and flair. She published more than ...”

“... problems of causation. Is there a collection of social or institutional preconditions which may be shown to account for it? If there is, then serious research needs to be done on Scottish government and society in the early 18th century, for the understanding of both of these remains limited. We ought also to be looking critically at the intellectual ...”

“... itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity – not infallible, for it may do wrong; but irresistible.’ And in 1776 Bentham launched his attack on ‘unmeaning’ statements: there were no ‘assignable bounds to the supreme power’ in a state. ‘To say that there is any act that they [Parliament] cannot do, to speak of any ...”

“... with him or her. And here the special token of love is that ‘it’ that wants to be found. We may remember from twenty years ago in Rabbit, run Harry’s vision of ‘this thing that wasn’t there’: ‘What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?’ Harry, of course, has many sentimental moments in these ...”

“... as it did a uniquely comprehensive monument to past greatness. Rhetoric, sentiment and panegyric may all have been eschewed (‘No flowers, by request,’ as Alfred Ainger put it), but it remained the DNB’s purpose ‘to do the state some service’ by ‘helping the present and future generations to realise more thoroughly than were otherwise possible the ...”

“... look at all experience through the highly selective prism of its effect on the Jewish predicament may sometimes be useful in certain political and social spheres, but in historical scholarship it can only lead to grotesque absurdities. Exclusive emphasis on the role of the Jews in, say, the Reformation puts one in mind of those photographs of great events ...”

“... art history is under strong attack from those who deplore its lack of intellectual content, there may well be something to be gained from looking at the influence exerted by a man whose genuine passion for ideas only rarely met with that critical yet sensitive response which is always necessary if the subject of art history is indeed once again to become ...”

“... The first thing that must strike anyone opening this well-produced book – and they may do so with apprehension, since company histories are notoriously bland – is the wonderful harvest of illustrations, ranging from No 1, a photograph of the founder and his son, the strangely whiskered Julius Reuter and Herbert, circa 1870, to No 63, a Reuters news picture of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ...”

“... at the micro level it is disdained as a fanciful speculation and treated as mere chance. This may be too stringent an approach, however. Historians do seek to resolve issues about the respective roles of individuals and milieus, and no matter how naive, they try to think through complex situations altered by the absence of key leaders. If Lincoln or Franz ...”