“... of biographies and autobiographies, Wagner-Martin worries that ‘choosing to write about a woman may not be the way to literary success: women usually lead lives that seem less interesting to readers.’ Such sweeping claims may have held true for an older generation. Carolyn Heilbrun recalls in the late Thirties and early ...”

“... itself out. What it then cancels into is realism: the political hope that real-life criminals may also be brought to book, that a Tory Britain in which the sick are left in the corridors of bed-starved hospitals may get its comeuppance. It is an index of the difficulty of totalising that system that this novel falls ...”

“... when it came, was by way of the royal prerogative of mercy. Indeed, this collection of tales may be read as a foot-note to the emergence of the theory and practice of absolutism among the Valois kings of France: as absolutism’s apologist Jean Bodin remarked, a royal pardon was one of the ‘ fairest marks of sovereignty’. The circumstances of the ...”

“... as a Christian continuation of the Roman Empire. Charlemagne’s coronation on Christmas Day 800 may symbolise ‘the birth of the West’, but only as the point on which rays of influence from all over Europe converged. The dark octagon of Charlemagne’s chapel in Aachen contains the whole inheritance of the religious and political history of Western ...”

“... with the two men have found Carrington likeable (of course), but not Tebbit. I suspect that may be because at home in England his Whitehall minders kept personal contacts to a minimum, and thus allowed his unattractive public image to flourish. In my dealings with him, however, I never found him the ‘semi-housetrained polecat’ that Michael Foot once ...”

“... true extent of his own involvement, as well as that of a mysterious character known as Dook who may or may not be the mastermind behind the drugs ring. The NDIU report he dismisses – supported to some extent by the then Assistant Commissioner Colin Hewett – as hearsay evidence which cannot have any relevance as long ...”

“... has been addressed to the Standard by Lord Salisbury’s House Steward. The Editor of the Standard may, perhaps, be allowed to add that he is not much in the habit of receiving telegraphic instructions from House Stewards; not even when they are in the household of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness ...”

“... the new work presents a more thoughtful self-portrait of Bloom, the female.Perhaps so, but we may be forgiven some doubt as to whether the fascination of Bloom’s ‘full identity as a woman’ is really what has got her book analysed in newspaper columns, crowed over at cocktail parties and passed about among friends with the relevant pages increasingly ...”

“... that he needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse. But whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one. Bookish children are advised to get their noses out of a book and take some fresh air. (As a troubled adolescent myself, reading obliviously in the midst of a performance of family life, I was given knitting needles and wool.) And ...”

“... to be, many of them were soon adopted by players who never joined the camp, and so on. All this may well be true, but the reader still wants to know what the battle was all about, and is offered only the sketchiest description. The same holds good of Eales’s accounts of the famous players of the past. We learn about their lives and careers, the games they ...”

“... belonged to the part of Europe rooted in Roman Christianity’. By dismissing them to the East, we may intend no more than a recognition of the fact of their predicament as captives within the Soviet Empire – although we in the West have some ambivalent feelings about empires – and we may not intend to imply that they ...”

“... world of private allusion’. Thus when we read in In Memoriam. ’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand   Where he in English earth is laid,   And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land, there is an allusion to a passage in Persius to which Arthur Hallam had himself alluded in turning a compliment ...”

“... author of these stories – melancholy and self-hating almost to the point of madness though he may have been – was greatly admired by his friends for his coolness, his reserve, and his wit. Nor should it surprise us, however, that his diaries and letters are ultimately stifling and infuriating when read in bulk. ‘If a neurotic tries to drag you down ...”

“... in the survivors shrinks daily. It would be easy enough to prolong this lament, but the truth may be that things aren’t as bad as all that. They can be changed if there is a mind, as there is money, to change them. The new journal Vanity Fair has just reappeared after months of preliminary publicity and the expenditure of very large amounts of cash. It ...”

“... lustful passion, the book is extremely reticent on the more intimate aspects of the affair, which may or may not have been consummated on a deserted airfield somewhere in the Midlands after Tearle had disappointed himself and the critics equally with his performance as Macbeth at Stratford-on-Avon. Miss Bennett was ...”