“... of Islam to the early Christian centuries within a deliquescent Roman culture, with Augustine’s war on the world’s virtues as merely ‘splendid vices’; and from that back again to Greek and, above all, Judaic idealism, an austere and fierce feeling for absolutes. It’s not my wish to load all this onto the author of Lucky Jim. But it does remain ...”

“... good for any poet, but especially not good for Larkin, who has in his Oxford Book waged a private war (or so it seems) on that very notion of ‘the best’. It is the nature of Larkin’s Oxford Book to act against most preconceived academic or critical or merely journalistic categorising of ‘the best’, in favour of individual ‘good poems’, the name ...”

“... of the German penal code in 1935. Unlike other Nazi laws, this was not repealed at the end of the war. Other communities who have been oppressed – Jewish people, say, or Catholics in Northern Ireland – have every opportunity to work out the implications of their oppression in their early lives. They hear the stories; they have the books around them. Gay ...”

“... woodwork from the period. The curator who acquires it, Harold Clifford Smith, is an upper-middle-class Englishman straight out of central casting: the son of a wine merchant, educated at public school and Oxford, devoted to his old college, a regular contributor to Country Life. During the Great War, he serves in the ...”

“... I think it runs the risk of tying Pissarro’s account of time too closely to a single set of class experiences, but he himself would probably have assented to it – that the character of time felt for in Le Champ de choux is that of ‘agriculture’ or ‘peasant economy’. Time passes in that economy, for sure; light thickens, bodies begin to ache ...”

“... that took her feeling for language as evidence of madness. When she compared herself to Pierre in War and Peace, her doctors thought she was describing a schizophrenic delusion. ‘I inhabited a territory of loneliness,’ she later wrote, ‘which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return ...”

“... perceives it, is quite plain. He wants to buy what cannot, in the end, be bought – authentic class. To watch him trying to pull it off is risible: the chairmanship of posher-than-posh Harrods, the castle in Scotland, the sponsoring of royal horse shows, the tarting-up of the old Windsor house in Paris – it is all so laughably transparent. And look what ...”

“... destroyed after being folded into the Nazi-Vichy administrative system during the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco to set up the United Nations. It hadn’t originally been scheduled to discuss a separate body for health, but a Chinese medic and diplomat’s son called Szeming Sze managed to push it onto the ...”

“... In May 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the ...”

“... he gleaned limited: ‘So far as your actual caretaking was concerned,’ he reported to the class, ‘it was bollocks.’ The lecturer consoled himself with the hope that, unknown to the caretaker, the evening might have opened doors. In this he was right: the doors in question belonged to the Ransomes’ flat. The police came round eventually, though ...”

“... own part. ‘The biggest Confidence Trick by a British Government since the Second World War’ is how the Combined Flood Group describes the government’s guidance for councils on building on flood plains. ‘Loss of the life [sic] comes third in the government’s priority.’ In Tewkesbury in general there is more hostility towards the ...”

“... law. For Leila Ahmed, it is institutional and legal Islam, determined by the politically dominant class, that has acted consistently against women. Ghada Karmi reads the Quran itself as two texts: one regulatory, which arises out of the conditions of the time, and the other universal, spiritual and philosophical, a guide to the inner life which by definition ...”

“... The civil service itself was cut from 481,000 to 384,000, reaching its lowest level since the war in 2016, just in time for the colossal demands of the Brexit transition. Only in 2022 did it recover to its 2010 level, but then in April Sunak decided to fund a spending increase on defence by cutting numbers all over again (by a proposed 70,000). In ...”

“... of seven of the children from their head teacher, but did not approach their class teachers. It is normal practice in cases of suspected abuse to hold a multi-disciplinary case conference – which would normally include doctors, teachers, district nurses, play-leaders, and anyone else directly involved with the family. No case conference ...”

“... ambiguity, as it is in the UK. But that isn’t the way things work here.‘I’m OK going with a class two misdemeanour because no violence was involved,’ the DA said, making little attempt at discretion. The man had been charged with child abuse, though his offence was simply driving over the limit with his child in the car. He was Hispanic, and, judging ...”