“... a Soulmate nearer her own age, was moved that same year to proclaim that, however ‘wide you may wander and far go ... you never will beat’ the wit of dear Margot. (‘Emma’, presumably, would have posed a dilemma for both of them.) Gladstone also resorted to ‘far go’, but won higher marks by extending his ‘argot’ to embrace ...”

“... seems never even to have decided what he really wanted to tell us. It looks as if at one stage he may have had it in mind to engage with Christopher Hill, whose heroic efforts to persuade a sceptical English audience that during the 17th century some kind of Marxist revolution occurred in England, leading to the rise of such things as capitalism and ...”

“... and become an air-traffic control assistant, but he is worried about a medical report which may prove him to be tubercular. The dust-cover biography of Alan Sillitoe suggests that the story may be partly autobiographical. The second section, a quarter of the length, gives us Paul Morton (in the third person, no longer ...”

“... 17th-century translator of part of Rabelais, must have been a most peculiar man. At a guess, he may have had to a preternatural degree that quality of mind, not unknown among modern scholars, that causes a man to believe that whatever he thinks, says or does is infallibly true and right, and that whatever he observes in the world is true and right only ...”

“... modern world’s ‘massive historic retreat from the mythical grounds of Christianity’. This may sound like the wilder theories about the Holy Grail or Atlantis, but Professor Steinberg is a serious scholar, and his thesis is buttressed with dozens of visual examples and with a formidable array of learned references. Whether he is right, of course, is ...”

“... with European and American views and evidence. By attending to very different histories, we may understand our own better. The place to begin seems to be the sheer fact that these literary histories exist. There are no contemporary counterparts in English about English or American literature. We have seen histories of the Elizabethan theatre audience or ...”

“... role differentiation is unjust and eliminable. He also suggests that experimental evidence may show that at least some male and female behavioural traits are biologically-based. However, it is less than clear that nature/nurture disputes can be experimentally resolved: the evidence we have of male and female differentiation is always evidence of the ...”

“... West’. America has always been some kind of ‘West’. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and others may have stayed in the East (relatively speaking), but they spoke and wrote endlessly about the West. Huck Finn decided to keep moving on, and what he talked about (if anything) when he lit out ahead of the rest, we can never know. When he took up the West, he ...”

“... programmes are acceptably ‘scientific’. Here we come to the heart of the matter. Eysenck may well be right to say that the common image of the scientist is wrong. He and Sargent may also be right to say that parapsychology is not the only area of science which has been convicted of fraud. ‘Is all IQ testing ...”

“... with central issues, a determination to come to terms with the truth, however unpleasant this may be, and also a responsibility for their own motives, a tendency to reify, an ability to dream in symbolical or even political terms, a willingness to mythologise their own predicament, which releases them, slightly shaken, from their past, only to teach them ...”

“... in animals, without repression, as independent motives with no sexual context. Thus, though there may well be a constant mutual influence between the motives, there can scarcely be a monolithic empire of the kind Freud proposed. 2. Freud is ahistorical. In spite of his real interest in history and archaeology, he treated the society of his day and city as a ...”

“... My own theory is that for most Britons South America has just been discovered. A Task Force may succeed where reviewers have failed: that great comma of a continent may have become commercial at last, thus enabling Marquez and all the other members of ‘El Boom’, the great explosion of brilliance in contemporary ...”

“... Thursday 27 May. Flight MA 611 from Heathrow to Budapest. The purpose of my visit is to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview of the event: a record 112 new titles are to be published for this year’s festival, with a total printing of three and a quarter million copies ...”

“... America, or Hollywood, was already the world capital of mass culture. Important though this may be for the economy, technology and culture of Europe, it does not greatly affect the politics which, for most of the time, is Stone’s main concern. Nor is it probably very damaging, at least in the context of a narrowly European history, that the colonial ...”

“... a novel representation of the culture of distance. It has led to much impatience, but then it may eventually be seen that the systematic exhaustion of patience has been part of the inner history of these events. The long, slow approach to the islands was a material reality. But then: to go all that way and do nothing? To hear those discussions night after ...”