“... among themselves, and their inability to reach agreed decisions meant that their political masters had to make up their minds for them. It all began when at the beginning of the century A.J. Balfour tried to create at least a framework for the making of a common defence policy by setting up the Committee for Imperial Defence. The Navy ignored it, and ...”

“... that the owners of the Times could have done more to restrain Dawson from his excesses; as it was, John Walter IV, co-proprietor with Lord Astor, complained when ‘our leader-writer’ proposed dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. His qualms were ‘airily’ brushed aside by Dawson. Half a century on, what of Rupert Murdoch? ‘Arguably,’ says Heren, ‘he ...”

“... into a specialism in the new psychology. Now it has been extended still further. Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and a host of more or less meretricious popularisers have quite literally brought it home. Sexuality has passed from the bench to the couch to our very own bedsides. But the domestication of this series of pseudo-sciences is not the liberation ...”

“... scheme, which, as he remarks, does not work well for the later part of life. But, as our masters are prone to ask these days, what is the utility and social significance of this project? As Burrow says, the various schemes give no good answers to someone who wants to know, for instance, at what age one became an adult. The schemes are traditional and ...”

“... literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight Macdonald were among the many writers active on the anti-Stalinist left who were in conflict with the League. Partisan Review posed a series of questions challenging ...”

“... of Alamein worried that public school boys, unduly influenced by the knowledge that their masters and tutors were legally indulging in unnatural practices, would join this carnival of homosexual activity the moment they reached 21, the proposed age of consent. When Lord Arran pointed out that no one worried about women in this context, the Field ...”

“... Painters was ‘deliberately designed to cause the greatest possible antagonism’, as John Pope-Hennessey put it (the second volume, published in 1891, the year of Morelli’s death, is more collegial). Morelli’s nemesis, Wilhelm von Bode, the director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, claimed it displayed a ‘most dangerous ...”

“... is particularly clear, MacKinnon suggests, in the case of the rape of slave women by their white masters: it would be preposterous to propose that whatever harm came to slave women by such violence, it had nothing to do with racial discrimination since the victims might have been white women or for that matter male slaves. Rape of black women was one of the ...”

“... of friendship and common intellectual excitement at Cambridge was enormous. When James Klugman and John Cornford, the Panza and Quixote of Cambridge student Communism, came to his rooms in Trinity to recruit him for the Socialist Society, they found a natural, eager joiner. Dazzled by their friendship, he found his way to the Communist core of the society, of ...”

“... gramophone records of Rumanian church music on the table, next to a pile of prayers composed by John Donne (who also preached at St Dunstan’s). This sturdy English church is encircled with chapels for several of the independent Churches which are in communion with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black ...”

“... a postmistress and a pot-boy (Bob Gliddery in Our Mutual Friend), seven surgeons, three dance-masters, a reporter (David Copperfield), a tobacconist (Mrs Chivery in Little Dorrit), two fishermen, 32 teachers, four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an ...”

“... numbers into the university’s pre-eminent academic college. Under a series of progressive masters, including Benjamin Jowett, Balliol adopted aspects of the new, relatively meritocratic and non-denominational culture of professionalism that was reshaping Victorian British elites, and encouraged many of its best students to take public exams in the ...”

“... about Australia. Ratih Hardjono, who works from Melbourne for Jakarta’s daily Kompas, led with John Howard’s win and the election-night speech in which he promised, hand on heart, a new commitment to Aboriginal reconciliation. Hardjono also wanted Indonesians to learn something about the democratic process from Australia: compulsory voting, the ...”

“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and ...”

“... began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the teaching profession by announcing an immediate review of the Statutory Order for English. No sooner had the review been announced than Mr Patten and his fellow ministers did their best to pre-empt its outcome. They let it be known that ...”