“... when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of ...”

“... and unsuspecting, openness offers joys which our involuntarily closed culture can have little or no idea of. It was such an openness which made the Victorian novel the richest, most seductive, most exciting in the history of the genre. It also, in Gay’s view, gives an equal interest to the diary of a Dodd, an Amiel, or a Mabel Barrows, a young ...”

“... of serial technique, though admitted that the music he got it from – Schoenberg et al – meant little to him emotionally or aesthetically. It seemed to be the only acceptable way of writing music in the American academic world of the early 1950s. Glass claims he knew little about the modernists who weren’t writing ...”

“... were given titbits to eat by their Irish tenants, who felt sorry for them. Like children in an Arthur Ransome or C.S. Lewis novel, they rambled unnoticed around the great house and were given to taking off on their bicycles up the main road to the nearby town. It is well known in the world of fairytale and post-Freudian analysis that it is not a good thing ...”

“... did he put it to the premier – Asquith had succeeded Campbell-Bannerman in 1908 – who had little choice but to accede. Already convinced that only he could win the war, he doubtless understood that he couldn’t hope to push Asquith aside without help – which Bonar Law was to provide. He put himself at the centre of the war effort, first as minister ...”

“... no use for hardihood,’ James says, ‘would be contemptible.’ In his own life, Michael has little time for the priesthood of the life force. He doesn’t believe in it; implicitly, he has ‘been preaching against literary vitalism all his career’. His only concession to life in extremis is an annual hunting trip, and in the opening chapter he ...”

“... their descendants have been regularly proposed in the US since the 18th century but there has been little comparable debate in the UK. Only with the growth of a significant Black population in Britain in the second half of the 20th century has the question of slavery and its legacies been brought into public view. The children of the Windrush wanted to know ...”

“... who were fed this tale (reinforced by Back-Room Boy, the propaganda comedy of 1942, starring Arthur Askey and set in a lighthouse). Maskelyne, whose Magic Gang never existed outside his memoirs, was of little practical use to the camouflage unit to which he was seconded, but was nevertheless encouraged, for a time at ...”

“... and his notorious surname associates him with criminality in the neighbourhood. ‘When he was little, Carney and his father played a game where he had to guess whether or not Mike was wearing his revolver under his pants leg. For a long time, he thought it was his father’s attempt to get close to him, bleak as it was. Now he was sure Mike was merely ...”

“... for nearly five hundred continuous years, were celebrated in magazines like Country Life, and Arthur Bryant was not the first to recognise its bay as ‘the loveliest in England’. Eton College used to send its scouts to Tyneham for their annual summer camp. The Times photographed the harvest here in August 1929, and spread the Baldwinite result – a ...”

“... with many finely discriminated senses, as the SOED helpfully makes clear. And whereas persons of little culture might plump for SOED 5 (‘to desire, wish for’) in its post-1706 usage, Willetts is evidently much attached to the original Middle English usage of SOED 4: ‘to suffer the want of; to need, require; to stand in need of (something salutary, but ...”

“... Dr O’Brien is mistaken about this and would have realised his mistake if he had travelled a little in the Arab world and talked to a few more Arabs. It’s a strange sort of siege when the garrison frequently attacks the besiegers and is never attacked itself. Since 1967, Israel has attacked or invaded six Arab countries ...”

“... of the French Revolution. Eastern palaces had been transformed into graveyards and, in Volney’s little book, ruins became teaching aids in a series of lectures on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he ...”

“... are allies, collaborators, members of a self-selecting elite or avant-garde; and yet there is very little interaction between them. None of the figures touches his neighbour; they may abut, overlap, hide behind one another, but there is no contact between them. It is almost as if they can’t wait for the sitting (and the standing) to be over, so that they may ...”

“... Archipelago was published in the West in the mid-1970s, Soviet Communism had already lost what little intellectual cachet it had left in Europe. Both Russian and American culture were warped and disfigured by the contest, however: one side by continuing Stalinist paranoia and a resumption of the purges and cultural repression that had eased during the war ...”