“... is wildly inaccurate to describe the pre-Revolutionary Church as ‘the old religion of a middle-class élite’. Mistakes of this sort are perhaps not very important in themselves, but they undermine confidence. More serious, in view of her argument that David was much influenced by Rousseau, is a certain vagueness about what Jean-Jacques actually said, and ...”

“... single most successful assertion of the British national interest since the Second World War and an excellent example of wise state intervention’ – would gain general assent except in the case of the section preoccupied (as he is not) with the hazards of nuclear power. He talks of integrated transport and energy policies as though he means it. He ...”

“... may be; nor, surprisingly, has it much to say about such current obsessions as race, colour and class. For protagonists of the sex war, however, there is a substantial amount of ammunition, ranging from ‘A maid that laughs is half taken’ (English Proverb) to ‘A woman is occasionally quite a serviceable substitute ...”

“... I was blind, now I see,’ did not show up at all well and were regarded as rather second-class sinners. Philip Toynbee gives himself no airs as a sinner. He is capable of an occasional rhetorical flourish about ‘the stews and gutters of Babylon’ and his own early apprenticeship to drunkenness, gluttony and lust, but the rakehelly ...”

“... National Context to show the limitations of reason within this movement. The needs of the social class within which the movement took place, and of the state within which they lived, put firm preconceptions into their reasoning. So it was entirely consonant with enlightened thought that serfdom should continue in Bohemia, or in the coal works of ...”

“... in County Cork, is the setting of The Silence in the Garden – decayed gentry rather than middle class. The Rollestons established their inheritance centuries before the book begins, and had an ancestral reputation for decency and kindness to their tenants during the Great Hunger. On the very first page the chronological parameters are drawn: It is ...”

“... The fighting had stopped after 12 days and the guerrillas returned to the jungle to wage their war by e-mail. But they have continued to sow disorder throughout Chiapas and the whole of Mexico has been unnerved. By day, emboldened peasants, many of them landless, rush onto some local farm, occupy the owner’s outhouses and run up tattered flags, painted ...”

“... conquest and was long reinforced by a pattern of discrimination that in effect made them second-class citizens. Every Quebec licence plate carries the motto Je me souviens. In this sense the situation has some parallels to Northern Ireland. The substantial enjoyment of equal civil rights is not enough to expunge the folk memory which sustains nationalism. A ...”

“... old friend. He is swamped with memories; of his brother, killed in the Philippines in World War Two; of his mother who never recovered from this loss; of his first wife, missing since the mid-Sixties; of his miserable, angry second marriage and his alcoholic wife; and above all of Drenka, the mistress, the respectable Yugoslavian woman who became an ...”

“... who escapes to India in the Thirties, is interned there as an enemy alien for the length of the war, and lives out the rest of his life, poor and lonely, in a Bombay slum. His only friend is a feisty German who was once in cabaret in Shanghai – the kind of woman who might have been sung by Lotte Lenya or played by Marlene Dietrich in her Touch of Evil ...”

“... he never read, so far as I know). During my second year at the University of Chicago, I found a class being taught by Wayne Booth. Booth, the author of The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep, was one of the more famous members of the English department, and was known to be a good teacher, too. He was also a lapsed Mormon, born in 1921 in the town ...”

“... even by the local standards, quite a lot’s been going on. Scarpia, early identified as a first-class stinker, lusts for Tosca, whose lover he arranges to have tortured, audibly, off stage. He then proposes to Tosca the classic operatic quid pro quo: the tenor’s life for the soprano’s favours. Tosca is unclear what to do about this, so she interrupts ...”

“... of what you went there to do. Copying isn’t only a way out of a problem. Teaching an art class at St Anselm’s, Yuan wants the girls to draw lobsters. Olivia Travers’s lobster has ‘very short antennae, a cluster of them streaming back behind each eye’. ‘The antennae must move forward,’ Yuan tells her: ‘The lobster uses them to make his ...”

“... ensured his place in popular culture. Although of the generation that grew up during World War Two, he anticipated the flower children of the postwar baby boom, and they were mostly responsible for his mass-market appeal as they engorged anthropology courses in the 1960s and 1970s. He did not, however, consciously seek out any particular audience: he ...”

“... with Milton’s Lycidas. The history it tells, of Cavaliers and Roundheads, of the Civil War battles of Naseby and Edgehill, as recalled by the family gardener who ‘skipt’d about the Bon-fire like a boy’ when the anniversaries came round, is that of the religio-political crisis of the mid-17th century in which ‘John Milton, Englishman’ was ...”