“... an interviewer recently that though he often felt the urge to write for the stage he was put off by the scrutiny to which he would be subjected: and the pun in the title of his autobiography was a precaution against exposure. It proved less necessary than he had feared, but the message underlying the opening chapter is ...”

“... British history is very English: written mainly by the English and about England. But Trevor Burridge is a Welshman by birth and a citizen of Canada. He teaches at the French-speaking University of Montreal. One might expect, therefore, that he would bring to English history an outsider’s sense of disbelief, or the cheeky irreverence of an iconoclast ...”

“... If the preferred style in American fiction of the last two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1967, was a composite text in which an account of a family’s visit to a fairground was spliced in with what appeared to be a set of instructions from a fiction-writer’s manual ...”

“... between actions and their social meaning. Pat Rogers’s approach to 18th-century literature is by way of popular culture. He agrees with other scholars that Augustan satire gets much of its vitality from its relation to Lucian and Juvenal, Rabelais and Erasmus, Scarron and Cervantes, but he emphasises its nearer relation to ‘the actualities of ...”

“... for the musicologist is to realise that the choice of studying other disciplines is governed not by his tastes and ideas alone, but by sheer necessity. Further, he must not only absorb the content of other disciplines, but – and this is much more difficult – put each to constructive use in his own field.’ Lang ...”

“... famous for being unfashionable. This creature thrived on being a spinster, which licensed her to be a bit cuckoo, and on speaking her hard words from a spindly frame decked out like a schoolgirl’s – as if it were a feat to think behind a fringe. For Stevie Smith the writer it was comfortable, though not always convenient, to live out of the centre of ...”

“... us of the role of economic development in our history, and force home the fact that there can be no true separation of economic history from other histories. The dates bounding the Checklands’ volume in the New History of Scotland might seem to be ones of political significance primarily, but 1832 and 1914 mark very ...”

“... John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in 1834, to a Select Committee of the House of Lords looking into ‘the State of the ...”

“... square is titled ‘Institutions cannot have minds of their own’, but only as a proposition to be rebutted. The assertion that institutions think is never seriously put in question. But what does it mean? Perhaps it is best to start at the beginning, or rather the end, for in her preface Douglas engagingly says that she has been writing her books in ...”

“... revered Heine: ‘Maybe he did make up the odd fact, but then he saw things the way they ought to be. His eye was more than visual apparatus and optic nerve.’ Roth, too, was endowed with an eye like that: it specialised in seeing things that had vanished off the face of the earth.The loss of his cradle wasn’t the first in a life of losses – Roth’s ...”

“... on the cerebral cortex, together with a smaller dose of theophylline, which gains its tonic effect by dilating the coronary artery. We like tea for its taste and warmth, but primarily we like it for its mood-altering properties. It is a very mild drug fix, and it has all the accretions of ritual, lore and paraphernalia which one associates with more obvious ...”

“... and the protection of freedom – in the knowledge that until we are truly equal we will not be truly free’. It is that self-evident truth, says Hattersley, that his book seeks to demonstrate. (Subtle politician that he is, Hattersley refers us to Susan Crosland’s biography of her husband ‘for a full account of the conversation’ between him and ...”

“... into Conflict and Prejudice’, and this is not strictly accurate, for the book manifestly and by design gives prejudice priority over conflict. This has the effect of making the material that Lewis has assembled manageable, and another consequence is that the book is immunised against the criticism that it does not give a detailed, nor even a ...”

“... that the most seasoned critic will never possess. The history of art as an academic discipline is by and large aligned with this hierarchy of value. Accounting for the existence of objects consumes the time of most people in the profession: documenting the facts of patronage, original locations and arrangements, details of technique, iconographic ...”

“... The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot appeared at the end of 1935, not quite three years after its subject’s death, and must be one of the very last examples of what was by that time a gravely endangered species. In the preface to Eminent Victorians Strachey had wittily mocked the solemn pretensions of the Victorian and Edwardian monumental biography, ponderously discreet as an old-fashioned manservant: but 17 years later Marrot found it still possible to produce a work of unblushing hagiography ...”