“... argues, recognised as an offence justiciable in every country’s courts. International law may meanwhile have substituted sovereign immunity for divine right, but human rights law has since 1946 gradually broken through this shield, placing the worst crimes of rulers against their people within the reach of justice and beyond impunity. It ...”

“... adverse criticism, but by and large his view of his brother’s work is clouded with stars, if I may put it that way. And anyway, his notion of what poetry is chimes discordantly with mine. ‘Technique is important in poetry only so that it may reveal the supernatural.’ Or, more unevasively still: ‘As Patrick read his ...”

“... trilogy, some of them, like Apthorpe, pushed to the edge of caricature: but although the people may be comic, the war itself is a serious matter. There is something dotty about Ritchie-Hook, the defence of Crete is a shambles, but in the end Waugh’s work belongs within the realistic tradition of the English novel. So does Olivia Manning’s Balkan ...”

“... a canter to the battlefield that is divisiveness and in the ensuing contest of wills the rider may fall off. One cavalry unit has, for the moment, ceased to exist. It ought to follow, but apparently does not, that when a right-wing government contrives to heighten social divisions rather than to obscure them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained ...”

“... the contrary, solitude was always attractive, and his mysterious journey to consult the Army in May 1968, during the crisis, was possibly a means of recovering a precious solitude). But he was not seeking isolation. With De Gaulle we are not, apparently, dealing with a man who is planning his accession to power, in the sense that there are politicians who ...”

“... I do not know the answer. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent primarily against nuclear attack. They may not deter aggression by ‘conventional’ (i.e. non-nuclear) forces, because in the event of, say, the Soviet Army invading Western Europe, it is not credible that the United States would pull the nuclear trigger, inviting a nuclear holocaust. Yet even here ...”

“... then threatened not to pay; and the Commission started legal proceedings against them. They may end up in the dock at the European Court. Future historians of Europe may see the whole story as a constitutional struggle, like royal feuds with the House of Commons in Britain, or federal versus states’ rights in the ...”

“... condemned to live in the shadow of apocalypse, without certainties or hope of moral progress, may explain why, from her first book to her last, all Tuchman’s work has dealt with wars: their origins, their consequences and, above all, what it was like to fight in them. At a time when professional historians were beginning to turn their backs on ...”

“... of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when such themes are handled.’ We may find Leavis’s circumlocution itself rather coy (‘Mrs Transome’s early lapse’), but I think it surprising that critics have not generally taken his lead and tackled the question of sexuality in the novels head-on. A glance back to contemporary ...”

“... Dances is now reissued as a paperback, in regrettably abbreviated form, with no pictures. We may trace in it the shifts and jumps of Gorer’s developing political consciousness, dancing uneasily between the back and the front half of the New Statesman. He was inclined to see (and love) his ‘negroes’ as sculptures, objets d’art, patterns of ...”

“... two covers will be counterbalanced by their price; and libraries, in this age of austerity, may think twice before buying duplicates of material they already possess. The Road to Middle-Earth, by T.A. Shippey, sets out to explore Tolkien’s imaginative writing in relation to the texts he studied and to the scholarship he published. Shippey thereby ...”

“... in which Coleridge departed from his original or followed briefly somebody else, even a specialist may feel that this material could have gone, to its advantage, in an appendix. The problem is simply readability. Following three lines of abstract, compressed argumentation, in four languages, on the one page, while leaping from one block of type to another, and ...”

“... the biographer is left in both cases with an achievement that is certainly impressive, but which may seem too vicarious to justify a great deal of attention. It included remarkable services to the fiction of Dickens and George Eliot, but also decades of much more routine editing and reviewing for the periodicals. Finally, the personal impressions of Lewes ...”

“... the town’s physical beauty ... As a nature lover, Kinsey must have admired the campus.’ This may be right. Or it may be wrong. Kinsey may have been blind to the regional differences, indifferent to the town’s look, disgusted by the campus, too busy to notice – ...”

“... durable, ‘a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike’. His poetry may be ‘of the surface’, but its complex achievements make it far from superficial. After all, ‘poetry of the surface cannot be understood without study’ and the immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind. No calls of unconscious to unconscious, no ...”