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“... enough. Even when writing those diverting and malicious short stories his eye had been on ‘the broad fields of the Continental novel’. To have the freedom of these fields while preserving the great richness of our own social, ethical tradition ought to be the ultimate aim of the serious English novelist today. Good and evil are the touchstones. It is in ...”

“... at the time, one can sometimes imagine him as a young Anglo-Saxon, rather like the narrator in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility, standing unobtrusively to the side of the action, a little in love with the lives he’s describing and at the same time worried about these people on whom so many difficulties have been inflicted, his grandmother ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”

“... tendency to think in terms of dramatic absolutes. A crude version of this argument can be found in William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a relentless piece of Nazi pedigree-hunting with some claim to be considered, despite strong competition, the worst book ever written on German history. Others have argued more subtly for the role played by ...”

“... particularly science-fiction fans, but Hubbard assured them he was interpreting religion in broad, humanist terms: ‘Before you say, “Religion, grrrr,” think of that – it is a practical religion and religion is the oldest heritage that Man has.’ Urban does not argue, as other writers have, that it was all a financial ploy, though he agrees that ...”

“... to music texts recalled from memory. Friends were soon killed, or reported killed. When the poet William Harvey, with whom he had had an intense friendship, was taken prisoner but presumed dead, Gurney wrote ‘To His Love’: ‘with thick-set/Masses of memoried flowers –/Hide that red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’ A corporal with whom he had fallen ...”

“... house in suburban Cheshire, most of my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth ...”

“... become human. Mothers’ and babies’ calculations of love reflect the law proposed by the late William Hamilton, a creative genius of sociobiology. (Hamilton died this year of malaria contracted in the Congo, where he was pursuing his latest ideas on the transmission of disease between species – arguably a martyr to his own passion for truth.) Hamilton ...”

“... the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that separated ministers and civil servants from ‘the broad mass of the British public’. Ordinary MPs and the press thought they had a better grasp of popular opinion, but they may not have done. This was a serious matter: if the government was to take the people along with it, it had to know how they felt and ...”

“... in vogue, so were many other things.’ Hard to argue with that. The thesis clearly reflects broad historical realities to the extent that cultural production got overshadowed by the long-arriving Second World War. The more the international situation became a cause for despair, the more tempting it became to concentrate your attention on your own ...”

“... having more information? (Questions like this abound in the law. Agreement on the balance is rare. William Blackstone thought it better for ten guilty men to escape criminal sanction than for one innocent man to be convicted. Matthew Hale put the ratio at five to one, Benjamin Franklin at a hundred to one. Bismarck, customarily robust, thought Blackstone had ...”

“... and photos and provides a good potted history of the game, from the moment in 1823 when William Webb Ellis, a boy at Rugby School, caught a football and ran with it, right up to the present. (Those who enjoy watching the modern game imagine Webb Ellis as a boy-prophet, running towards them with an egg hatching in his hands.) His legendary act is ...”

“... medium in which literary reputations survive. What kept the Eliot conversation going was a fairly broad agreement that The Waste Land, ‘The Hollow Men’ and some other poems provided a durable image of what he himself called ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. As Eliot’s fame grew, critics inevitably ...”

“... at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the glamour of Rhodes’s imperialism’ led the country to ‘strange adventures’. Nowadays the picture seems less clear. Imperial enthusiasm may have ...”

“... of ring-tailed roarers, pork barrel philosophers, stand-up comedy of a high order, wit and a broad vein of redneck shrewdness. It can be very entertaining. As much fun as drinking, as they like to say, but without the hangover and all for a dollar. Matthew J. Raphael (a coy pseudonym used to protect his alcoholic’s anonymity) investigates the life and ...”