“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... presents rationality as our birthright. The human mind, he wrote, is a perfect computer corrupted by ‘incorrect data’. He urged readers to reflect on their lives and ask themselves: ‘Where is the error?’ With the help of a lay therapist, called an ‘auditor’, they could uncover early traumas – mothers who wanted to abort them, or slept with too ...”

“... its own space, and which populated it with judges who, although titular lords, no longer had to be peers, made provision for appointment to the new Supreme Court to be open to any lawyer of more than 15 years’ standing. (It failed to take the opportunity to make leading legal academics eligible – a gateway which, for ...”

“... is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides ...”

“... were not so beautiful. They were a strangely squat, ragged-faced crew for a 16-year-old girl to be ogling; from plain to downright ugly, if you don’t count Glen Ford or Dana Andrews (who weren’t exactly Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift themselves). My generation have Cahiers du cinéma, Godard and Truffaut to thank for the earlier generation of movie ...”

“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... Decade, the 1970s was the only decade except for the 1930s during which Americans grew poorer. By the late 1960s, around a quarter of all new investment by US companies in electrical and non-electrical machinery, transportation equipment, rubber and chemical manufacturing was being made abroad. As the new decade began ...”

“... use cobbles imported from China, in a landscape of good Scottish stone?). The rhetoric of hope (‘be part of better’) is what brought Alex Salmond and the SNP their immense victory. Greenock and Inverclyde was one of the very few Scottish working-class constituencies to stay with Labour, but only just: the SNP vote boiled up to come less than 2 per cent ...”

“... into the first, it needn’t. As a form of words, it’s ordinary, so for it to zing there has to be some sort of voice behind it: ‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York’ (The Bell Jar). Good ones can do ordinary and extraordinary at once; they can do the novel in ...”

“... Yet in the historiography of Tudor England she has become a shadowy figure, a sad frump eclipsed by her savage husband and the brazen mistress who supplanted her. Giles Tremlett’s splendid biography seeks to correct that perception. Notoriously, Henry came to hate the cast-off wife he once doted on, but it’s Tremlett’s contention that when Henry made ...”

“... attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive Englishman posed the already canonised Americans a grave threat. ‘We cannot be all the writers all the time,’ she wrote. ‘We can only ...”

“... main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom’. Hall thinks – what might at first glance appear paradoxical – that he also reconciled them to their empire. Thus bolstered, they strode out into the world, confident both of their own national ...”

“... the enemy, Chalara fraxinea, as the mother of all fungi, a Milosevic-Saddam pathogen that had to be stopped in its tracks. The trouble was that no one knew how to target the offender. The next thought, it followed, was that we should eliminate all infected trees, not just saplings imported from Europe but mature ash in British forests. Maybe even healthy ...”