“... and perceptive. Unfortunately, only a couple of years after he started work, America entered the war. Ray saw active service as a naval officer on aircraft-carriers in the Pacific but still managed to complete in 1946 a four-volume Letters and Private Papers which substantially revised (for the better) Thackeray’s image. After the ...”

“... to polite social routines. She lived comfortably in Santiago’s barrio alto, the upper-class suburb, with her children and her Chilean husband, Víctor Jara. She was a ballet dancer and choreographer, he was a theatre producer who had become famous as a politicised musician, singing his own songs in folk clubs and at political rallies. Like Pablo ...”

“... was born over a hundred years earlier and – much more important – into a completely different class of society. If Hardy had to make his own way in the world, Cowper was a fugitive from it; having started where such genteel employments as the clerkship in the House of Lords lay open to him, he was driven by invincible nervous depression to carpentry and ...”

“... someone Lurie-readers have met previously: briefly a member of the Corinth English faculty in The War between the Tates, he now stands for the newer American academic professionalism, for its characteristic mid-European impatience with antiquarianism and with the nostalgia for things English. The article makes Vinnie look forward more keenly than ever to the ...”

“... Warren Smith, hears the sparrows sing in Greek, believes that his best friend, killed in the war, speaks to him from behind the trees in Regent’s Park – and prefers death to doctors. Hearing the dreaded Dr Holmes about to burst into the room, Septimus flings himself ‘vigorously, violently’ out of the window, to be fatally impaled on the railings ...”

“... of Chicago? I think it broke down very quickly, at least in the Twenties. After the Second World War the Jews were shocked out of this and turned again to Orthodoxy but no longer the old Orthodoxy – to a sort of suburban religious life without much substance to it. The earlier generation lost their kids to the streets very soon, if not to the world. The ...”

“... love affair and the unhappiness that followed; her work in a soldiers’ canteen; and after the war her move to Paris and her marriage to the mysterious Jean Lenglet, about whom she seems to have known unaccountably little. She had now started to live the kind of futile, penurious life so well described in her first four novels: sleeping a lot, drinking a ...”

“... lonely wood. Davies began Young Emma in his 50th year. Not very long before, just after the Great War, the time had come for the Super-Tramp to settle down. He was living frugally and in humble circumstances in the West End of London. Settling down meant marrying and moving to the blissful country. It meant walking the streets of London and staring into the ...”

“... century. Actually he had already made one abortive stab with Memoirs from the Declaration of the War with Spain’, begun in 1746, now first published by John Brooke as an appendix to his edition. The title is misleading, for these are annals of the Hanoverian accession, and don’t get anywhere within hailing distance of Jenkins Ear. The date is ...”

“... to reclaim this comfortless man, who had learnt in his old age to travel the Western world, first-class and rather gloriously, as a late-maturing literary lion. He chose to stay on in a hotel in Geneva and to die there. The interviewers – did anyone ever give more interviews than Borges, or should it be the same interview more times? – were always asking ...”

“... the gutless Lord Mark Rand, gnashes his titled English gums helplessly. Given his class and country, the chances of Lord Mark not being scheming, weak, pale and under-equipped are nil. Lucky, Married Men, Sinners, Chances, The Bitch: Jackie Collins’s oeuvre, which now extends to a dozen titles and over ten million copies in print (Hollywood ...”

“... By comparing the prosecution rates to food prices, by showing how rates correlated with periods of war and peace, by noting the similarities between Surrey and Sussex, he proves that prosecuting levels did not merely reflect anxiety and prosecuting zeal. His account of the role of the magistrates, the nature of the juries and trials, the changing nature of ...”

“... English audience was, what the original Greek audience may have been, a comfortable urban middle class, prosperous enough to believe in virtue and true love, towny enough to view the country only as a nursery of picturesque innocence or a theatre of primitive brigandage. The relationship was indeed recognised: but it was now sterile. A century after ...”

“... made a few million in the City; he has successful children, he was awarded the CBE, and to his class he has become a martyred hero, a reverse scapegoat, surrounded with friends and support. The real scandal was not what Profumo did – having had the affair with Christine Keeler, he judged that he could lie his way out of it, and had it not been for her ...”

“... deep spiritual need. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage war against bootleggers, liquor stores, gamblers, murderers, prostitutes, racketeers, prejudiced persons or institutions, or any other existing evil as such. Our ministry is not reformation but transformation. By 1980 Falwell had repudiated this sermon as false ...”