“... flock. What the landlord did not take in rent, or the gombeen man on interest payments, the priest took on tithes which were very often of his own invention. Most of all, though, the priest and the people conspired in an attitude of such repressive severity towards sexual matters that, for all its traditional generosity and sympathy in other respects, the ...”

“... is an oddity, on the face of it, that she should be so much admired by the cohort from which she took General Tilney, Sir Thomas Bertram, Mr Woodhouse and Sir Walter Elliot.) Is Barbara Pym, too, a novelist for older men? Certainly they have so far been more gallant and vociferous than women in championing her. Lord David Cecil, ...”

“... double-meaning, mocking, outrageously blend warm feeling and cold eye. The intellectual change took longest to come. ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death’ were Yeats’s last words to us, carved by his command on his gravestone in Drumcliff churchyard. Time was when we had not the cold thinking to match the cold looking. The simplest illustration of the ...”

“... ways and read into it what they would like to find. One reason for this is that, as in the case of John Stuart Mill, a writer with whom one may notice many parallels, there is something of a conflict between heart and head, and between the intellectual positions which logic forces him to accept and the ones with which he feels most at home. Although union ...”

“... man sent man with one proud look towards the tree, and he was gone, the humble one, and there he took the poison and returned at dawn are an off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of ...”

“... renaissance, is also concerned with what might have been, and with a legend which has run from Sir John Holles to S.R. Gardiner. He shows Henry as heir to the aspirations of the Sidney circle, a patron of the arts, and a champion of the Protestant cause. Whether the English financial system would have permitted Henry as king to have championed the Protestant ...”

“... work suggests, someone whose losses to date were reimbursed by a philanthropist, or who took an amnesia-inducing drug that led him to think he was starting tabula rasa, would have a lower propensity to take risks. The subject’s assessment of the starting position influences whether she takes a prudent or a risk-seeking approach to a given schedule ...”

“... it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a man has a vast grudge against is the man’s determinant’. Something similar seems to be true of ...”

“... but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority’. He is particularly annoyed by the late John Plamenatz, who contrasted ‘the healthy “civic nationalism” of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts’. Annoyed not least because Professor Plamenatz of All Souls was actually a Montenegrin. Given the ...”

“... million bikes in Germany on the eve of the war, underlining yet again that most Germans cycled or took public transport to work and thought of the motor car, if they thought of it at all, as a leisure vehicle. Ordinary Germans were right to be sceptical about the savings scheme. Not one saver got a Volkswagen: the money all went into arms production. So did ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”

“... to other fields, and fractal geometry’s original applications were mainly non-economic. What took him back to the study of markets was an episode that can only be described as Mandelbrotian. In the week beginning 12 October 1987, the global stock-market boom that had started in 1982 began to experience turbulence, with a sharp fall on the Wednesday, high ...”

“... interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired in his chapters on poetry. He is less at ease discussing verse than he ...”

“... Infatuated with his own historical dream, according to which, ‘like Kokoschka, Schoenberg took his initial step into a new world of feeling within the framework of lyric poetry, but then quickly broke into the open with a radical turn to theatre,’ he ignores the all-important part which purely instrumental thought played in this critical phase of ...”

“... be learned from his numerous autobiographies. But Evelyn, who enjoyed a happy, normal childhood, took against not only his parents, their friends and the whole man-of-letters world that they, and particularly his father, inhabited, but also against his brother and his brother’s friends – despite the fact that it had been Alec who introduced him to the ...”