“... Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done some things that were worth remembering. Thus, with the Reynolds News affair, the wish to set the Sitwells to one ...”

“... hardly even suited to be Mexican.’ ‘I’ve no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favour?’ But an alarming number of others seem to have stepped straight out of the condescending dreams of D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry, all immemorial wisdom and ethnic patience. They say things ...”

“... sovereign that this nation has ever known. Even his sons, who enjoyed a bad press in their day, may have escaped complete derision because they were more involved with charitable associations and voluntary societies than posterity has generally recognised. Predictably, George IV was less generous to others than his father had been, while being much more ...”

“... and Thomas make too few connections between the early successes and the later failures, and may thus have allowed the pendulum to swing too far back. The revisionist case for the Eisenhower presidency has revolved around two related but not identical claims. One is an argument most forcefully presented in (but not original to) Fred Greenstein’s 1982 ...”

“... perhaps the circumstances in which she wrote it seemed, after the war, too distant; and it may be that it was too closely attached to her private feelings anyway. As many of her critics remark, Barbara Pym’s fiction characteristically takes off from some autobiographical reality: the unexpectedly high incidence of anthropologists, for instance, is to ...”

“... through the pretence of utter indifference to any other possibility. As a gimmick the Modern may fire an arrow backward, but must always shun the convention of consciousness running free in time – being ondulant et divers. This is as true now as it was in the days when the Modern was invented, and practised by novelists like Hemingway or Anthony ...”

“... 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 studies in Islamic Architecture have an overt function – whether prayer, teaching, interment or pleasure – yet seem to have been built with other, covert aims, as ...”

“... of story here, something just offstage, but once you get the hang of reading him, you realise he may be bluffing, and that you have no way of telling. There may be a secret here, and it may matter. There may be a secret, but one of no importance. Or ...”

“... 1,000 miles an hour, nearer a quarter than a third of a mile a second. ‘More than twice’ that may be put at two-thirds. At the latitude of Athens the cruising royalties, as they keep pace with the dawn, go at about 800 miles an hour, almost a quarter of a mile a second. The working fairy goes almost three times as fast as they do, but they can catch up ...”

“... It may be that only the truly self-absorbed can make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing, inward-bound mammoth of a book, where the author laboriously chronicles and inspects his every moment for changes in the moral and spiritual weather ...”

“... now in Philadelphia.) The ready-mades, too, are gathered into Duchamp’s private world. They may have signalled a radical displacement of art from the domain of making to mental distancing, but before they became public they existed already as shorthand emblems of frustration or subverted purpose in the artist’s personal vocabulary. They augmented ...”

“... a new world: it answers some questions that have hitherto been asked in vain and others which we may not have thought of asking at all. What sort of people collected paintings in the 19th century? How far did they specialise, or were their tastes catholic? What were their motives? Did they buy from artists or dealers, or did they commission works to their ...”

“... vivid memory of the common fight against the overwhelming odds of Fascist barbarism. These terms may have become suspect and sentimental, but they will stand. It is sometimes supposed that the Wehrmacht of Hitler’s time was less brutal in its operations than the SS and its understrapping torturers. This was never true in Eastern Europe, and least of all in ...”

“... from ‘eager-midfield-runner’ to ‘man-capable-of-magic-moments’. Without that goal, Platt may not have been so lucratively pursued by the Italians. He may not even have lasted in the England team. Graham Taylor, though, was always a Platt fan, and Platt owes a lot to Taylor. One of the most strenuous sections of ...”

“... homo: the concept is rejected both by heterosexuals (unwilling to accept the possibility that they may not be as straight as they think they are) and by homosexuals (outraged by the easy option offered to make them straighter). The very term is semantically ambiguous, vacillating between the original botanical meaning – ‘of two sexes’ or ‘having both ...”