“... House in the autumn that revenues were high and the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement could soon be reduced to about a billion a year. Ten billion, he announced, can now be put aside for future ‘contingencies’. There seem to be three Conservative claims. The first is that the economy ...”

“... Maxwell, two of the most prominent of the New Generation poets, retraced the journey undertaken by Auden and MacNeice in Letters From Iceland – a sign of the renewed interest which younger poets are showing in the poetry of the Thirties. Although Yeats and Eliot were publishing some of their greatest poems during the Thirties, it was Auden who created the ...”

“... letting out little hollers, rinky-dink battle-charges, but I sat still. I was laughing a bit by this time, and they obviously knew I knew about them. Eventually, they got within one or two tombstones, and I looked up from the page. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Cunt,’ they said, running away, tumbling through a wall of ivy as if the whole world was ...”

“... great difference between Malone and Malvolio, however, is that Malone, so far from being taken in by any forged letter, would have published a big fat book exposing its inaccuracies. The supreme legalist of Shakespeare studies (he trained and worked as a barrister before turning full-time to the profession of letters), he seems to have been fired about ...”

“... fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history. My slow awakening may well be typical. Whatever their knowledge of the great dress designers – from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Schiaparelli to Westwood and Miyake – I do not think that many people could name a great tailor or men’s clothes designer who flourished before the ...”

“... Islamic studies have existed in an academic ghetto which reinforced the essentialist view shared by the Islamologues, that Islam was somehow ‘different’ from the West. A more fruitful approach is taken by Michael Gilsenan in Lords of the Lebanese Marches, based on field work he conducted in a Sunni Muslim rural area of ...”

“... is time to get things straight. He bribes his way into the hotel room of the man he is supposed to be. On the table he finds a photograph of the person who tried to kill him the night before. In the bathroom he finds a ‘bulleted’ hairbrush – his double had dandruff. In the wardrobe he finds a suit. He takes off his impeccably tailored Hitchcock-grey ...”

“... in Orlando Stadium, the ANC high-ups arriving in Nyala armoured cars. Impala jets – developed by sanctions-struck South Africa to fight the likes of Slovo – flew overhead in salute. Apart from this ceremonial flummery there was much genuine grieving, for in the last five years of his life Slovo had won an enormous army of admirers. In many ways he was ...”

“... Anyone writing a novel about the British intellectual Left, who began by looking around for some exemplary fictional figure to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves spontaneously reinventing Stuart Hall. Since he arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951, Hall has been the sort of radical they might have despatched from Central Casting ...”

“... in the summer of 1994 and at the Hayward Gallery last winter, included a small group of paintings by artists popular during the Third Reich – the type of painting which was excluded in 1985 from the Royal Academy’s survey of German art in the 20th century. The labels that accompanied these pictures at the Hayward warned that they could have no claim to ...”

“... arising from that event. The lectures have been reconstructed, from extensive notes and drafts, by the historian Dorothy Thompson, Edward’s widow, who also supplies a brief Introduction and a briefer Epilogue. All this is done with astonishing reticence. Although Dorothy Thompson shared in the determining research both in Bulgaria and in War Office ...”

“... is both lavish and comprehensive. It also insists that you come to a conclusion about him. To be offered something as complete as this and not sort out your ideas would be slovenly. Which is not to say that it’s easy. The pictures are brilliantly painted, intensely pleasurable – and oppressive. To start with ...”

“... such folk know that good has triumphed over evil and that if any problems persist, they can only be due to the legacy of apartheid. Any suggestion that the truth is actually a lot more complicated is often met with rage and moral disapproval. This Manichaean certainty reaches its zenith in the cult of Mandela. The cult has solid foundations, of ...”

“... thirty years, since Winnie Ewing’s triumph for the Scottish National Party in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, the rest of Britain has become ever more accustomed to hearing Scots drone on about their distinctive identity and needs. At last we Scots have had an opportunity to redress our grievances. On 6 May 1999 we cast our votes for the first Scottish ...”

“... Such ambitious theories, symptomatic of both Marxism and reactive anti-Marxism, have been censured by social scientists for their lack of intellectual rigour and indicted for taxonomical imprecision. What is a crisis? Who were the gentry, or the aristocracy? On the other hand, a different kind of historian wonders why we should not ...”