“... is for cure or oblivion and in the last stanza just about chooses a return to the normality which may have been his undoing in the first place. In ‘Daddy Wants to Murder Me’, the poet-persona revisits his seven-year-old self, I sit in the garden reading Homer, shy lad under a folding one-man tent and daddy                   wants to ...”

“... other hand never to have met a biology undergraduate who has read The Origin of Species, and it may be that Almost like a Whale is his attempt to deal with the fact that the book is widely cited but largely unread. It’s no paean to Darwin, however, and is unlikely to inspire students to rush to the original; one ‘one long argument’ in a lifetime is ...”

“... staff to manage them, corruption and fraud were probably inevitable. The Commissioners themselves may not have been directly involved in fraudulent practices, yet widespread fraud was and is a reality. A 1989 House of Lords report put it rather well: ‘The huge sums which are being lost due to fraud and irregularity against the Community are losses borne by ...”

“... if they are made everywhere equal: that is to say that there will be no part in them where armies may not easily march.’ Scott’s collection of case studies forms a rich and learned compendium of Modernist hubris, but he wants to create more than a commonplace book: the studies are meant to illustrate a general case. After all, the particular case has been ...”

“... was insufferable and that he must do what he could to save it. One or two of his close friends may have wondered whether a memoir should be written; and then put the idea from their minds, remembering those touching and boring notices in the Times which read: ‘NM writes: Colonel Jocelyn Lethbridge – always known to his friends as “Stubby” – will ...”

“... exactly what his style says, and this is curiously impressive. The difficulty is that though he may deeply believe it as a man, the style can still sound equivocal because of his well-bred English persona, the image of a spiritual gentleman. His hero and heroine are the victims of the style, instead of really embodying it. As in many one-off ...”

“... Well, it has nearly all come true, but it does not particularly elate us. Indeed it may even depress us. But neither the expected elation, nor the depression, are reasonable. The truth is plain that, though a limited amount of social planning is necessary for any well-intentioned government, it is essentially foolish to try to plan a whole ...”

“... Polish patriot should work productively for the cause of the People’s Poland. But Norwid, one may suppose, never conceived of restraints and obligations without corresponding liberties. Norwid laid great emphasis on the relationship of beauty to utility. Beauty exists to enchant man into work; Work, that man may rise ...”

“... rest-rooms in the service stations,’ an old Rhodie counselled me. I can assure him that Zimbabwe may or may not be on its way to a new social order but standards are still holding up. ‘Rhodesia is super,’ the T-shirts used to say. The new version is ‘Zimbabwe is kenge,’ which means roughly the same thing. David ...”

“... One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the title-page is Men. The jacket is the part of a book where publishers most candidly make known their views. Publishing contracts specifically reserve to the publisher the right to determine its appearance, unilaterally if necessary ...”

“... the mackerel-crowded seas more mackerel-crowded than any seas a man of my age can describe. It may be true. It may be true. You’re born in Cork in 1900, you grow up with the new century and with a sense of an equally new Ireland. In the dawn of Easter Week, 1916, some youngsters, including O’Faolain, probably felt ...”

“... of impersonating a shopkeeper. Not a ‘snobbish’ shopkeeper either (if the anachronistic usage may be permitted), nor, as we have seen, one who seeks to disguise his own humble origins. There is a gap between the Drapier’s voice and his impersonator, not necessarily because Swift would not have admitted to humble origins, but because he would hardly have ...”

“... burst, and that the Jewish population grew as intellectual philo-semitism declined. Toleration may have been the fruit of indifference rather than of enthusiasm – although in the case of Charles II, who liked variety and eccentricity, one might allow something for curiosity as well. In many ways the England of 1700 was, in modern parlance, a more ...”

“... and the erroneous statement that conscription had been accepted by the Government in 1938. One may have reservations about Sir David’s handling of the military politics of the Thirties, but as a biographer he succeeds very well in bringing out the sharp contrast between Brooke the austere, impatient professional soldier and the reserved but emotional and ...”

“... great divergences of opinion, not hard-and-fast orthodoxies, even if the balance of such opinions may have differed as between regions, confessions and social or professional groups. One of the greatest common merits of the two books under review, so different in many respects, is that they emphasise the extent and severity of these disagreements. In this ...”