“... central paradoxes of Victorian Britain: namely, that while the highest office in the country was held by a woman, political life was almost exclusively a male preserve. She reminds us that Victoria was brought up in a domestic, female-dominated environment, but that after 1837 she was obliged to deal publicly with men, who were also very much better educated ...”

“... difficulties’? It had better be a lot, since a lot is looked for now. Those who long held de Man’s criticism in special esteem are in the position of having to offer him as a political or historical critic of some sort, because, just at the moment, that is the way to make a critic presentable. Here lies the interest of Romanticism and ...”

“... was because he found the answer I have just quoted that he was able to act as he did. Ambition had held him back, not driven him on. He had to transcend it before he could make the leap which may yet turn out to have transformed British ...”

“... A third approach, in conscious and deliberate opposition to this shared rural sentimentality, held out the alternative prospect of a glittering, metallic future, dominated by machines, scientists and technocrats, most famously and prolifically articulated in the novels of H.G. Wells. It is in this fertile, Fin-de-Siècle context of confused and competing ...”

“... quotation from F.R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry where the way forward from Eliot is held to lie with Ronald Bottrall. To their credit, Eliot and Leavis did give some attention to MacDiarmid despite their political differences: but it was Edwin Muirrather than MacDiarmid who became canonised as a Faber Poet, and to understand his later poetry it ...”

“... case of the public response to the Iraq war, Surowiecki’s conditions seem pretty much to have held. These conditions are strikingly similar, whether Surowiecki knows it or not, to the ones set out by Rousseau in The Social Contract for determining if a people is capable of governing itself. Here is Surowiecki: If you ask a large enough group of ...”

“... monarchy now exists for only one purpose: ‘our amusement’. And this has become a widely held view, in Britain, the United States, in Europe and throughout the Commonwealth. When Paul Johnson appears to be talking sense on a contemporary issue, and when the defence of the monarchy is left to such characters as Lords Rees-Mogg and St John of ...”

“... things will come, my dear. Let you dream of this.’ The once standard mythology of gay history held that Forster’s happier year arrived in 1969. Lesbians and gay men have been able to look back in anger, or bemusement, on the dreary history of pre-Stonewall gay representations, which seem to have been divided into two chief modes, conservative-moralising ...”

“... actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first scene, with a kitten in his lap, the most benign and enchanting ...”

“... in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, the sense of the impossibility of change – of being held for eternity in the claustrophobic embrace of the Soviet elder brother – was even stronger than in the Soviet Union. There the older generation, at least, remembering Stalinism, could see some merit in a relatively benign stasis. And then the unthinkable ...”

“... potentates who feel threatened and are no better than those who threaten them … If Obama had not held Hollande back, he would have gone after Assad in Syria, just as Sarkozy went after Gaddafi in Libya … with the result we’re familiar with. The second was personal. Roussel knew all the victims well and this made him both angry and sorrowful. He denounced ...”

“... strongly objecting to both. The notion that criminal tribes existed was a product of widely held ethnographical ideas of the period, according to which particular tribes shared common characteristics, being, for example, ‘warlike’, or ‘given to plunder in times of disturbance’. The British Empire plodded on until well into the era of ‘human ...”

“... because ‘ornament, visual or rhetorical, runs counter to one of the most deeply and confidently held articles of modern taste, and we have lost – or rejected – the language for taking it seriously.’ In Michelangelo’s lifetime there were critics who felt that such an exhibition was more appropriate for a garden loggia than for a chapel: Pope Hadrian ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... low-profile, best-selling author of some of the most remarkable historical fiction of the century. David Sweetman met Mary Renault in 1981, when he interviewed her for the BBC; he had been under the spell of her books since he read them as ‘an awkward, insecure teenager’. He brings to the art of biography a well-intentioned gentleness that is rare; but it ...”