“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”