“... irresistibly lucid prose: it seems as if the decisive move was made before he put pen to paper. John Austin borrowed a phrase from Aristotle’s Poetics to describe this effect: ‘events outside the tragedy’. If we want to get off this stage, how are we to do it? The ladder seems to have been kicked away. The parallel argument current today hustles us ...”

“... to join Curtis Brown, the agents. Small publishing is a risky undertaking at best. I remember John Lehmann’s warning: ‘You sit there listening to the rats under the floorboards.’ As a sailor, I would prefer to say that storm cones were for ever up. But we had our satisfactions. Some of our books are still in print, notably Rex Warner’s volumes of ...”

“... several of the most important members of the reigning Whig Junto – the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to join him in a scheme by which Kidd was to be sent after the pirates in a vessel provided by the ...”

“... impatience with Romantic antiquarianism can be sensed in the Short History when he comments on John Montague’s poem about a group of old country neighbours: ‘Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.’ These old people, who inspire mixed feelings of tenderness and repugnance, are compared by the poet to a ‘standing circle of stones’. For ...”

“... freedom of choice. But what are these necessary limits on freedom? The reports starts from John Stuart Mill’s classical discussion, in On Liberty, of the proper limits of government interference with the freedom of the individual to conduct ‘experiments in living’, if he so chooses, and it cites Mill’s equally famous stress on the evil effects ...”

“... this ugly reality. Their incomplete mental adjustment to the fact of partition is the subject of John Bowman’s remarkable study. His revisionist stance may seem unnecessarily aggressive – it is after all no secret that in the private session of Dail Eireann on 22 December 1921 de Valera endorsed the so-called ‘county option’ – but he points out ...”

“... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...”

“... naming of parts; to Dickinson, the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth by resorting to foreign parts of it. Or by subjecting home truths to the stress of foreignness. Russia and the USA are his main resorts, the one for fulfilment, the other for provocation. But his criticism ...”

“... narrative has a touch of Croucher’s self-righteousness, his low-Tory snobbishness and John Bull bloodiness. Tony, declares the author (unashamedly the God’s-eye narrator), ‘had been an archetypal shit, but the affair with Chloe had discovered in him dangerous virtues. Thoughtfulness, a degree of constancy, even patience itself.’ Salaman ...”

“... battles which made the break inevitable. He shows that Evan Luard’s Socialism Without the State, John Horam’s calls for ‘market socialism’ and David Owen’s evocation of the co-operative, decentralist element in the British socialist tradition exemplified a widespread mood, with which the old Right of the Labour Party had no more in common than had ...”

“... with ‘the corduroy panzers’; dismisses the Poet Laureate as ‘poor old John Masefield’. Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ...”

“... and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow’s inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also ...”

“... most of the time. What happens to them later? A few insights about that can be obtained from John Cornelius’s odd little book about Liverpool 8. Rather more can be discovered from the book edited by Paul Barker, The Other Britain. Liverpool 8 is a series of vignettes about people and places in and around Toxteth by a graduate of Liverpool Art ...”

“... Years ago Sir John Plumb declared: ‘The past is dead.’ He didn’t add: ‘long live history.’ But try as historians will to put the past behind them, others are always resurrecting it and abusing it for their own purposes. Take the mindless mouthings of ‘Victorian values’, the ‘good’ (or the ‘bad’) old days, the Dunkirk spirit, the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald – in all such sloganising, the ghosts of the past are conjured up to clinch arguments about the present ...”

“... Bloomsbury homosexuality. A year later came Lawrence’s abortive effort at blutbrüderschaft with John Middleton Murry. In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William Hocking; then, just as he was putting the finishing touches on Women in Love, came his involvement with the failing marriage of Godwin and ...”