“... 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 ...”

“... to him, which possibly advanced my longing. The guards didn’t even frisk me. I think Tito may have been amused by the spectacle of a fifteen-year-old English girl who spoke bad Serbo-Croat and who had come all this way to see him. The great Croat who held together his own remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Croatia with ...”

“... of his behaviour rather than his age. Nor is it always the part of youth to be the wild ones. They may come on strong for discipline, reversing decadent trends, restraining reckless middle age. The novelty of 19th-century generationalism lay in a new self-consciousness about generational differences, and a desire to discover in them some historical ...”

“... Thatcher and President-elect Ronald Reagan). The imminence of a new phase of ecological stability may, however, be prevented by new imbalances: the prospect of population decline in some areas, and raw material, particularly fuel, shortages in others. McNeill complements this theory of ecological and political balance with a theory of cultural innovation. The ...”

“... great number of poems by a great number of people from Michael Drayton to Craig Raine’. These may seem curious choices as termini of the English tradition, but at the modern end he seems to allude to what has become something of a critical orthodoxy on Raine – that he is the newest and best thing going, modern poetry at its most winning. None of the ...”

“... over the man in the field. But to the blue-collar, semi-employed youths who yell for Rambo, may this moment not suggest the revenge on Sony, Nissan, Toyota and Mitsubishi? Today’s cold war with Asian capitalism excites scarcely less passion than did the hot one with Indo-Chinese Communism. Rambo as protectionist paradigm? The screen, a smaller one ...”

“... removed from common human speech to devise questions that no one has ever asked in order that they may provoke suitably ingenious answers. I do not know that this is exactly a crisis in literary criticism. In a world full of sin and misery what happens in the arts faculties of universities rarely deserves the name of crisis. And it is not so much an occurrence ...”

“... or perhaps because of them. In Hollywood, no one will ever say ‘no’ to an idea. Someone else may be fool enough to pick it up and develop it. It may become, at some future date, desirably hot. The closest a person comes to ‘no’ is ‘I pass.’ Rarely wishing to show his hand, everyone with power in the industry ...”

“... to the last relaxed years with the Duchess of Portsmouth. There is also some modern sauce. Charles may have been sexually, if unconsciously, attracted to his sister, Henriette-Anne, who was married to the sexually ambivalent brother of the French king. It is all beautifully told, with lively asides. We are informed that Charles’s alleged debauchery, as ...”

“... long and successful career in the civil service, bringing him close to the machinery of authority, may have contributed to his angry and pessimistic view of the system. At any rate, he gave it up for literature, and for 16 years edited the radical journal, Notes of the Fatherland. Censorship meant that a lot of his satire took the form of fables and ...”

“... makes it easy to use. This is not the author’s fault, but the publishers’. The publishers may also, perhaps, be responsible for the fact that the author makes no attempt to evaluate or compare testimonies. Old men forget, and things may not have been just as the characters here say. I cannot, for example, believe ...”