“... men in authority are the material on which to concentrate study. Once it is accepted that there may be other springs of action – two obvious candidates are demographic and technological change – it becomes sense to widen the field. Even the most old-fashioned historian has to admit that men alone can’t breed. The change allows new topics to be ...”

“... all life and subvert all freedoms’, and even thinking or reading about them for too long may induce ‘nausea, clinical nausea’. So Martin Amis in ‘Thinkability’, the introduction to his collection of stories Einstein’s Monsters. The monsters are the weapons – but also ourselves, who are ‘not fully human, not for now’. Given such a ...”

“... and do the right thing – the reasonable, decent, liberal thing – what one comes up against may simply not be amenable to rational argument and good intentions. Such bafflement has obvious comic potential at a sod’s law level, but it can also be a cause for deeper dismay. This underlying apprehension surfaces in a rather melodramatic way in the ...”

“... clubs and construct mad legends about the golden years when they were in charge. Such fairy-tales may be comforting to those who weave them. But the rest of us should not believe them. Oddly enough, the Conservative Party is by no means unique in possessing a highly misleading mythology about its past. The Liberal Party, as was, had its share of ...”

“... that kind of Literature – which would make it more what it ought to be.’ He went on: ‘This may not seem much to read, but I mean a great deal by it in the writing.’ On receiving Lewes’s second novel, Dickens explained that the troubles he was having with rehearsals for one of his theatrical enterprises had ‘Swallowed up’ the great many ...”

“... other hand, it has many unfamiliar photographs (not counting stills), and any photograph of Garbo may seem worth having. Besides, its preposterousness evokes – far better than a cleverer book like, say, What makes Sammy run – the dream landscape that stretched all the way from Hollywood to UFA in Berlin and Svensk Filmindustri in Stockholm. So much for ...”

“... She herself suggests that the ‘sense of displacement and vicariousness’ which she suffers from may be part of a more general condition. It certainly gives her enough motivation to convert her rehearsal of the knowable facts of Adrian’s life into an imagined re-experience of them. It gives the novel’s climax – the revelation that the guilt for ...”

“... cross (‘To bed very furious and tantrumical,’ ‘I was extremely gruff – unpleasant’) we may conjecture that it is her illness that is causing the page ‘to crackle with rage and frustration’. People who write about Virginia Woolf appear to be especially prone to sentimental over-interpretation of this kind, and one suspects that their heroine ...”

“... He established a JDL fund in Evans’s name that continued to exist into the Seventies. It may well be that Kahane’s present obsession with Arab men having sexual relations with Jewish women and his proposal of Nuremberg-style racial purity laws for Israel are at least in part a consequence of his guilt over the Evans tragedy. The attention Friedman ...”

“... tobacco. His voice is musical-metallic, – fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these decades, such company over a pipe! – We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic, – his way is thro’ Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless. And Jane ...”

“... self-mocking and costive and excitable and trapped: – if she’s a clamped oyster that may or may not have a liking for him then he can only be a claspknife that turns into Kinch the fearful Calvinist a hard penis a hand writing with someone else’s pen before shifting to the perspective of the woman: he lies ...”

“... of the Opposition whom it was rumoured might have been done away with by the KGB. James Bond may have come about as a defence mechanism, a charm against the way of life Fleming saw himself threatened with after his marriage; rather in the same way that Kenneth Grahame produced another potent bachelor fantasy, The Wind in the Willows, when he found ...”

“... Tom-all-Alone’s, ‘rookeries’, slum courts. One’s understanding of a given Victorian image may be seriously impoverished if one fails to measure it against the reality. Graham Davis has established that a notorious Bath rookery, Avon Street, had a much more socially and economically variegated population (including some quite well-to-do families) than ...”

“... museum contain the Holocaust only by labelling it ‘history’, a series of past crimes that we may now observe from a safe distance? What if we were to object that the Holocaust was not ‘history’? Should we then demand its removal from the sanitising grip of the museum? What, in short, belongs in a museum? On this side of the Atlantic, displays of ...”

“... to read as Freud’s detachment, coldness and barely-repressed hostility to his ‘sons’. There may have been some truth in his sense of the master. But Freud had grievances of his own, and it is essential to be aware of them, preferably by reading this journal in conjunction with the letters Freud and Ferenczi exchanged over the years. It is not that ...”