“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... However, the strain of her inflexible attitude, with its insistence that her way is the only way, may well be telling. Sometimes the mind blots out reality and compensates by believing only what it wants to. Perhaps it was not just a wilful desire to misinform that led Mrs Thatcher to insist, in a confrontation with myself on Nationwide in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been under my management.’ Himmelfarb’s studies of Darwin, Disraeli, Bentham and Blackstone may be read primarily as essays in historical revisionism: though all have implications for wider moral theory, it would be possible to view them as merely academic. A less clinical and more contentious note is struck by the essays in which Himmelfarb deals with ...”

“... than Nazi Germany or even Franco’s Spain. One cannot admit to being bored with the problem but may wonder what else there is to say. In A Sport of Nature Miss Gordimer breaks out of the enclave with a novel about a Jewish girl who makes love to black Africans, travels around the world and returns to her homeland, ‘the new African state that used to be ...”

“... another account – of the Darwin-Wallace story. But Wallace is not now the forgotten figure he may once have been. He was a much more immediate writer than Darwin and his seminal contributions to animal distribution studies are acknowledged by most academics. More important, after his barnacle studies, Darwin was no longer really a ‘species man’. He ...”

“... and the book’s ending gives further evidence of this courage, in contrast with what there may be in her of the supine, accident-prone and excitable, a contrast which may supply the clearest instance of her duality. As a cradle Catholic still affected by the traditions of her community, she has seen the point of ...”