“... 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 ...”

“... women on the edge of breakdown, but they looked pretty robust, if a bit impatient.’ It may be that Mass-Observation encouraged her in a habit which came naturally. Since most of us can bear the sufferings of others with fortitude, it would be wrong to mock Nella Last’s obsession with visions of drowning sailors and slaughtered hosts: but she does ...”

“... about the use of the SPG, and the ‘Sus’ law, or criticism of ‘Operation Swamp’? These may be examined when the Clutterbuck opus is next up-dated. In this book, he falls back on the eroding effects of television drama and documentary. Heavy fire is concentrated on Gordon Newman’s four-part series Law and Order, which he dismisses as agitprop ...”

“... regular ‘streets’ of cumulus clouds that develop by convection on a sunny afternoon; or they may keep stopping and starting, with uncanny regularity, marking out time like a slowly beating heart. In other words, the forms of living beings are not static equilibrium patterns like the rows of atoms in a crystal, but are ordered dynamically and maintained ...”

“... like this. In a century from now, when the nature of ‘Modernism’ will be clearer, the pundits may, after all, decide that ‘Modern Art’ (as distinct from Cubism, Surrealism, Minimalism and the many lesser eddies all conscientiously described by Harold Osborne) is no more useful as a term than Romanticism or Classicism have been in helping us to ...”

“... might doubt the first argument, and indeed the second: Lycoris, like Propertius’s Cynthia, may have remained a symbol long after she ceased to be a siren). In that case, the great man is Julius, not Octavian; the compliment is an early rung on the ladder to the top. The third poem is another epigram: ‘Now at last the Muses have made me poems that I ...”