“... would be anti-Conservative committee-rooms, as happened in the Vale of Glamorgan by-election in May; that Arthur Scargill would be seeking to become a fully-owned subsidiary of Ron Todd? Yet all this has come to pass, and so has industrial action by academics. That is, for me, the saddest development of all. Fashions ...”

“... interpretations advanced by other scholars and critics. But however unusual this volume may look in comparison with the kind of ambitiously interpretative catalogue we have become used to, it is entirely characteristic of the series of catalogues of major exhibitions of 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven ...”

“... believed. Cromwell had always believed in the right of the Saints to be captains (not generals, it may be noted), but he had never believed in a world in which Saints took over power from gentlemen. Indeed, the letter to Hampden in which Cromwell first expressed his demand for better officers expressed a desire for officers who would go as far as a gentleman ...”

“... and outlaw category for men too, but they can move freely from one to the other, and indeed it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother ...”

“... to see why the union should have seen fit to push the industry to the brink of collapse. It may be rational, even in a time of recession, to take on a plump multinational subsidiary like Ford’s, but it seems insane to grapple over the rusting hulk of some near-bankrupt nationalised industry. A rational explanation of union behaviour in these cases ...”

“... youth. The trouble with such package deals is that when one item loses its authority the believer may throw out the whole lot, bag and baggage, baby and bathwater: he may rush to the opposite extreme, seeking out illiberal values to embrace with a fervour that embarrasses old conservatives. Bill Hooper, the hero of The Good ...”

“... left almost entirely unanswered in 1968, seems no nearer a solution now. And, while information may be abundant, considered responses to, or even basic analyses of that information are not. In Britain, any mention of violence or abuse directed against children (including acts committed by other children) provokes outrage. The concepts of persistent danger ...”

“... possibly all of them – will eventually develop Aids and die; in the meantime, of course, they may infect anyone they have sex with and any children they bear. Projections for the rest of the century show that a dozen years hence, in the year 2000, barring unprecedentedly rapid progress in the development of a vaccine, or an unpredictable change in the ...”

“... who has ever felt drawn to the remote but seductive question of what form the first human language may have taken will have been stirred the other day by Gillian Shephard’s announcement that the Government is going to spend (a very little) money on coaching our young inarticulates so that they stop ‘grunting’ and start using words. This looks rather like ...”

“... response to the outcome of our natural and reasonable pursuits of such indifferents, whatever it may be, is to view it as just as appropriate as any other outcome to the nature of what we pursue and to our nature as pursuers. In this respect, success and failure are simply two impostors, and to see them as such is what true success consists in. But it’s ...”

“... sunny optimism. It is tempting to think that the main value of this final sequence of letters may lie in their detailed record of the weather in London in the late 1870s; largely, one gathers, it was disagreeable. ‘Mostly wet, thick and dark and of a low temperature, shrouded in dark fog, though once a week or so we ...”

“... ashamed of itself . . . If this is the future of Brit Lit, gawd help us all.’ Be that as it may, Pelevin should anyway be looking over his other shoulder, as the comic-strip Anna Karenina blasts its way into the 21st century, to a generally horrified reception. Ilya Tolstoy, the novelist’s great-great-grandson, has said he can’t believe it’s a ...”

“... more modest way, the ‘long awaited motorists’ driving manual’ 1288 (BBS, 317 pp., £18.99, 3 May 2000, 1 903029 00 7) by Derek Bracegirdle subverts certain assumptions, too. (I don’t understand the title.) The book, ‘probably the most exciting, enthralling and entertaining driver’s compendium ever to reach the bookstand’, has been ‘compiled ...”

“... of memory, scalded into a state of permanent vigilance (‘never again’). Such high-alert modes may only be for groups and nations that reiterate one central truth at the expense of others. (The exercise of the imagination may look to them like denial or frivolity, as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film The Lives of ...”

“... was the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, who was killed in his capital city of Srirangapatna in May 1799 by Company forces. After 1800, when there were few such iconic hate figures available for the Company’s publicists to focus on, the idea of a threat to the Company and its rule was increasingly diffused across population groups rather than centred on ...”