“... the other ethnic groups in apparent harmony. It is a small stratum, which also includes higher-class Chhetris and some Shreshta Newars and Thakuris, of whom he is writing. The way children are brought up within such ‘Bahun’ households contributes to the fatalistic and hierarchical attitudes. There is very little discipline; long breast-feeding on ...”

“... go together we can see if we look at Milton, yet Milton, too, had no love of the middle class and despised its notions of propriety and decoration. Milton saved up his monarchism for heaven, and defended chopping the head off the living and inadequate King, but he had a baroque eye for the grandeur usually associated, if not with courts, then with ...”

“... a one-time security man, Duszek, once instructed to eliminate Konwicki in the early days after the war, but now thoroughly mellowed out, and given to uttering gnomic pieces of folk wisdom about the Poles, little gems like ‘Drink makes a Pole merry,’ ‘When a Pole complains, he feels better right away,’ ‘When a Pole sees a balcony, he wants to ...”

“... up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.’ And in the 20th century, especially since the Second World War, a number of distinguished literary scholars have devoted years to studying and generally celebrating Pope. With the publication of a collection of essays on Pope and a new edition of the poems, Pat Rogers might appear to be laying claim not only to a place ...”

“... were, and how they all became later: bland. McCullin’s harrowing, challenging pictures of war – Biafra, Vietnam, Bangladesh – were considered the property of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about ...”

“... The trial took place in a blaze of publicity. When Annie eloquently defended the right of working-class people to sexual knowledge, a taboo was broken. For the first time a woman had publicly advocated birth control. At the end, the defendants were lucky to escape prison on a technicality. Annie’s friends had been right to fear its effects on her ...”

“... and Old Catholic. The Old Catholics are pretty well spread about the world. During the last war they were helpful to Anglicans in Java and even in Nazi Germany: their Dutch and Swiss congregations support an Anglican diocese in South Africa. They have been in full communion with the Church of England for 50 years, and Gordon Huelin’s collection of ...”

“... as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow Northern poets into selections from the cheese-board ...”

“... explanation for his becoming a Marxist, while perhaps acceptable at the height of the Cold War, may by now seem somewhat physiologically reductive, and alternative explanations are possible for his shift – or rather return – to the left. He had after all worked for the ILP before the war, and as Gish notes, the ...”

“... the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer War. Later, as Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, their proprietorial arrogance and political manoeuvring became a legend. As Scott approached retirement, Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily Express ‘a paper of prejudice, not thought’. And the Berry ...”

“... by President Reagan and by Mrs Kirkpatrick at the UN, with an acute consequent increase in Cold War tensions – was propagated despite the existence of firm intelligence evidence that it was untrue. This is, in several ways, a rather curious emphasis. It is, for a start, hardly news: as I pointed out in my own book, the fact that the Reagan Administration ...”

“... Neville depicted Porter as Seth, a knuckle-cracking, gawky Australian detester of ‘the English Class Thing’. Jannice went on writing to Micklem after her marriage. She and Porter had two daughters, but there were quarrels, resentments, silences. Each had affairs. By the 1970s, when Porter was establishing himself as a poet, the marriage was in ...”

“... legacy of 17th-century radicalism. By the 18th century, the Good Old Cause of the Civil War had been revised to meet contemporary tastes and susceptibilities, with Puritanism given a classical, if only partly Augustan veneer. Ironically, in 18th-century Ireland it was Presbyterians of this classical republican stamp – not Catholics – who tended ...”

“... to say – asserted that she was suffering from ‘uterine disease’, the catch-all for middle-class women whose behaviour was out of line, especially those women who liked men in the way that men like women. Parliament took Edward’s cause to heart and the Divorce Act was amended on his behalf, allowing him to appear as a mere witness rather than a ...”

“... over in the British Library, Marx is making a pig’s ear of the history paper. His analysis of class societies proves ‘flawed’, ‘naive’ and ‘ludicrous’. So what led people to think that these three supposed classics were so marvellous in the first place? Various explanations, such as Myles Burnyeat’s suggestion that a great text lends itself ...”