“... whose view that the war was the product of a misguided foreign policy, but could scarcely be brought to a stop overnight, was not always well understood by out-and-out pacifists or out-and-out opponents of capitalism). The war brought Labour to the forefront of national politics, but the first post-war election ...”

“... deep chord among those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been ...”

“... of disorganised and confusing events, lacking clear definition and structure. They seem to be a kind of sudden rupture which is only uncertainly related to its immediate environment – life in Brixton or Southall or Toxteth. No longer quite predictable and intelligible in the manner of ordinary, uneventful social affairs, riots invite being described ...”

“... Carmi’s prose combines accuracy and grace to such a degree that readers without Hebrew will be able to enjoy the book almost as much as readers who have it, while those, like myself, who are in the process of learning the language or have only vague memories of it from the dim childhood past will find many hours of pleasure awaiting them as they ...”

“... for a qualitative deviation in the murderer’s demeanour, a frightening glint or a nervous tic by which to know him for different, we were baffled by his ordinariness; anxious not to be thought ill-mannered, he held out no greater token of a need for forgiveness than this piece of ...”

“... planned but not published. Some of what was published in his lifetime was published in French, by his friend Dumont, with little help from Bentham, and retranslated into English. After his death his disciple Bowring added to the confusion by publishing an edition of Bentham’s works which seems to aim at recording ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general ...”

“... Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society, licensed it to be printed). It is one of the oddest couples in the history of thought: the man who, as a late 17th-century Cambridge student was heard to say, had ‘writt a book that neither he nor any body else understands’ and one of the multitude who understood scarcely a ...”

“... Even the youngest boys in the room turned to stare, gazing at him ‘as if he were a statue’. By now, perhaps, too many page-three captions in the Sun and too many lectures from Andrea Dworkin have taken the impact out of the epithet ‘stunner’ and taught us to think of beauties as passive victims rather than masters of the gaze, but to the Greeks the ...”

“... again, putting Jean Harlow on the couch below an elongated, brooding Freud; she appears to be dreaming of cacti, shown outside the window lighting up the night sky. Covarrubias is illustrating one of the ‘Impossible Interviews’ that ran in the Vanity Fair of the Thirties. There he is yet again, crowding together in aggressively two-dimensional ...”

“... shouldn’t matter, but which has mattered and therefore has to matter. In a world uncontaminated by injustice, we could regard heritable differences in skin pigmentation, physiognomy, hair texture and body morphology as superficial traits. We could be, as they say, ‘colour blind’, treating those traits, as we treat the ...”

“... panel paintings, both sacred and secular, were decorated, suggesting that they were designed to be handled as well as hung, and many portraits had lids so that their frames formed the sides of boxes in which the pictures could be safely stored, as well as making handy and attractive borders for the image. The ...”

“... about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s ...”

“... According to the careful estimate given here, there was some embroidery in these accounts. By the end of his premiership Lloyd George hardly needed to embroider. The job was being done for him. To Baldwin he was a ‘dynamic force’. Keynes called him ‘this half human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic ...”

“... In its short history, Australia has weathered several storms. By world standards they were minor, but at home they loomed large. The First World War was a rude awakening; the Great Depression hit harder and lasted longer than anywhere else in the developed world; and the Second World War could have been the end of everything ...”