“... aristocratic grandeur. Some indication of Mayfair’s stately, splendid and sumptuous past may be gleaned from the acknowledgements page in this appropriately stately, splendid and sumptuous volume, where names like Abercorn, Derby, Mountbatten, Scarbrough and Wemyss surge before the reader’s eye, in a cascade of coronets. Since Lady Bracknell’s ...”

“... called a ‘second publication’. He gave his plays life on stage as performance texts, and may well have rested content without giving any second publication to more than two-thirds of all his oeuvre in his lifetime. The labour of editors to restore Shakespeare’s texts is, to some extent, a kind of taxidermy. He even kept from the press the ‘sugred ...”

“... the Hughes novel, complains about the travesty Frank Richards made of his character – obese he may have been, obtuse never. There’s the History Prize he won in 1910 to testify to his possession of actual brains in place of the low cunning ascribed to Bunter. It may also be meant to remind us of Aitken’s later ...”

“... Velazquez ‘conceived and realised’ what Brown calls ‘a style of court decoration which may justly claim a place as one of the wonders of the Baroque age’, in the Alcazar, the principal palace in Madrid, and also in the Escorial. And this was not all. In 1652, the King appointed his painter aposentador mayor del palacio, an office which put him in ...”

“... as we stumble into the future a provisional map is better than none at all. Scholarly detachment may be something to aim for in fifty years’ time, but engagement is what we need now. The radical Right has a clear vision of recent events. So have Tony Benn and Militant and the other factions of the Left. Ideological history is riding high and all these ...”

“... unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love.’ That may sound a rather beautiful incantation in French – but not in English. Here is another: ‘The music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable.’ The magic of ...”

“... have an accurate and full work of reference on almost every aspect of the subject on which they may need information or further referral. This is the second point on which the size of the work is to be defended. But there are other grounds as well. Since the last great war, Australian literature has become a subject of study in universities all over the ...”

“... history of modern ideas about man. Foucault II is a ‘microphysicist of power’ who, after May 1968, examined modern techniques of social control. Foucault III undertook a comparative study of the pagan morality of the Greeks and Christian morality, with the aim of clarifying our own moral assumptions. The stage we seem to be reaching now is Foucault ...”

“... represented the big increase in spending and the crucial stimulus to the economy. Its importance may have been obfuscated because it was part of the Nazi scenario to disguise military projects as work creation in the early years. Yet up to 1935 Reich spending on public works like roads merely compensated for the cuts that local communes had made in their ...”

“... aversion to the Eye certainly seems to have been different from the conventional dislike. It may have touched off fears of a deep and dangerous conspiracy against himself. ‘ “Is your aim to smash Private Eye?” he was asked. “No,” Goldsmith snarled, leaning across and jabbing his finger at me. “I only want them to be more ...”

“... is to ‘H.P. and to those who have shared their experience, strength and hope’. Who H.P. may be is decently private; but the phraseology directly alludes to the tradition and practice of Alcoholics Anonymous. Angels strikingly resembles the freewheeling, good-natured narratives which AA irreverently calls ‘drunkalogues’. In them, members publicly ...”

“... The discovery of insulin may be rated the first great triumph of medical science. The first important contribution of the great pharmaceutical companies to human welfare was surely the preparation, purification, standardisation and marketing of insulin in a form suitable for self-administration by the afflicted patients ...”

“... that this vicar, on his birthday, ‘used to give us all a lavish dinner at Kettner’s’, one may, without being a great connoisseur of the clergy, think that one begins to have some clue as to the sort of priest he was. It was in this parish that Williams elected to serve his first curacy. Open the book again, however, and one finds: ‘I believe that ...”

“... courtesan, is hauled before a Dutch colonial court, so that her daughter and her wealth may be taken from her. All subtleties of language are reduced to the plain, prurient coarseness of the law-courts and the press. ‘She was not allowed to use Dutch and ordered to use Javanese. She refused and used Malay.’ When the case is resumed, after an ...”

“... do: it gives a shape to its subject’s life; but it also offers enough detail so that the reader may, if he wishes, construct a different, alternative shape. Day-Lewis senior seems to have thought a good deal about the shape of his own life, and in his writings suggested two possible patterns. Looking back over his work in 1951, in the preface to the Penguin ...”