“... the institutionalising of literary study it has been comparatively neglected by academic critics. Roy Pascal’s Design and Truth in Autobiography, published nearly twenty-five years ago, remains an indispensable pioneering work; more recently John Pilling’s Autobiography and Imagination provided some interesting studies of particular autobiographies by ...”

“... in 1990. The privatisation of industry which accompanied this decline is graphically described by Roy Medvedev. At first, vouchers were issued, which were supposed to give every citizen an equal share of state property. This merely led to the transfer of industry into the hands of its old managers. Yeltsin then launched the so-called ‘monetary phase’ of ...”

“... just about made in the programme, but what is more noticeable is how ex-grammar school boys like Roy Strong are sentimental over their teachers, which ought to be sympathetic did not the camera go in vampire-like to catch the tears.Maybe my parents were just undemonstrative as I remember nothing comparable to the pride of the parents of Neil ...”

“... And think that Stansted’s the best place to say it. The SAS are on tap looking scarey, A mighty strong card if we have to play it. As hijacks go, though, this one’s airy-fairy. The price they ask is vague and kind words pay it. Believing that their cause is understood They throw down weapons mostly carved from wood. A mess on our own doorstep’s thus ...”

“... how different it would have been if Descartes had written: ‘We think, therefore we are.’ Roy Porter tells the story of evolving conceptions of human nature in the Enlightenment. The basic answer offered to the unstated second question is: ‘Living as we do in an originally Christian culture, we see ourselves as a mixture of flesh and spirit.’ The ...”

“... was the abolition of the veil. In 1941, according to Ahmad, a sceptical university professor in Roy Mottahedeh’s book The Mantle of the Prophet, ‘women such as my aunt, who hadn’t left her house since Reza Shah’s forced unveiling of women, felt as if they had been released from prison, because they could appear in the streets in their chadors.’ In ...”

“... act together. If monetarism triumphs, so that, within the next two years, the economy develops a strong upward surge and unemployment begins to fall, Mrs Thatcher could win a second term. But few economists see this occurring soon enough to save the Government. 2. The Labour Party gets its act together. This would require either that the Trade ...”

“... Since the publication of Roy Fisher’s sequence City, in 1961, his work has been praised by fellow poets, but his refusal to strike marketable postures, during a period in which reaching an audience has increasingly depended on a poet’s willingness to do so, has kept him relatively unknown. This neglect is the more understandable given Fisher’s publication history ...”

“... shockingly little to show for it, and it is an open issue whether we have anything to teach these strong-willed and level-headed Victorian women about the pursuit of happiness. So we revert to an earlier question: ‘what sort of history is the history of the body?’ As Outram emphasises, it must be an account of embodied behaviour; its subject the creation ...”

“... even the animal kingdom showed ‘the same spectacle as the world of men. The arrogance of the strong, the servility of the weak, low rapacity, ephemeral pleasure purchased by great effort, death preceded by long suffering, all belong to the animals as much as they do to men.’ In effect, Outram’s Cuvier was a marginal man ...”

“... on Grenada, in which he was going to speak. In this debate, ‘Wayland Young (Lord Kennet) and Roy Jenkins (Lord Jenkins) were on particularly good form.’ According to Urban, Roy Jenkins announced that Reagan’s ‘grasp of his marbles sometimes seems to be precarious’, and Urban then quotes another long sentence at ...”

“... as a ‘provincial’ bore, there have been poets around for some time, such as Edwin Morgan and Roy Fisher, who give the lie to that. Home is no longer ‘so sad’. At home few people speak Proper English all the time. Home-based poetry may be in dialect, which is present in nearly all the writers considered here: but it may also fuel itself with a ...”

“... of friendship with Michael’s widow, Rachel, with whom he would have ‘late afternoon cups of strong tea at her flat in Flood Street, Chelsea’, incline him to say such things as ‘it is no exaggeration to assert that the Redgraves defined and extended the possibilities for actors in every medium for over a century’ or that ‘the most commonly used ...”

“... though it might pass muster externally, could be vastly improved.’ As you can see, it has been a strong week for the Self – or, more accurately, for that ancient English art of seeming to give the Self the really hard time it deserves. Self-deprecation, self-accusation, self-effacement – is it not strange, in a way, that the English should have written ...”

“... Tony Crosland’s epoch-making book The Future of Socialism was published in 1956. That Roy Hattersley’s aim is to don the master’s mantle in the late 1980s is evident not only from his book’s subtitle, but also from his brief account of a conversation he had with Tony Crosland a week before the latter’s fatal stroke ...”