“... in the army. He was sent to France in November 1917 and invalided home with a shell wound in May 1918. His undergraduate career began in earnest in January 1919. During his training, Lewis had developed a close friendship with another fresh-faced future subaltern, Paddy Moore. Lewis’s relationship with Jane Moore, Paddy’s mother, was to be arguably ...”

“... did he or didn’t he?’ Of course, not everything has to be footnoted, and truth may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative ...”

“... the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive reform. Whatever may happen now, it was plain the defeat of healthcare would have been a death-blow to the Obama presidency; its passage has given him time to discover the means for a renewal of presidential energy. Yet the bill passed without a single Republican vote, and its ...”

“... is it for? Who and what should be included in it? And where does it take place? For all that it may appear to offer a uniquely intelligible account of a clearly demarcated political and geographical space, national history is intrinsically problematic. Territorial and maritime boundaries are usually porous. The frontiers of virtually all self-proclaimed ...”

“... the comfortable classes to ignore such appalling conditions. Out of fashion today, Priestley may not seem to belong in this company, and I have to admit that I came to English Journey expecting sentimental uplift mixed with anecdotal illustration of the claim that there’s nowt so queer as folk. There is a certain amount of that, but it’s far from ...”

“... of habeas corpus has in recent years lost much of its practical importance. Experienced judges may retire without ever having granted the remedy, or being asked to do so. This is not because today’s judges are less protective of personal liberty than their forebears – perhaps the reverse is true. It is because the function of habeas corpus has, to a ...”

“... a general with real ships and real soldiers who inflicted real damage on the people of Samos. It may seem absurd that on an embassy of such critical historical importance as that sent to Philip from Athens in 346 men were hired to tell jokes imported at some expense from the Sixty. But laughter lubricated the more resistant parts of international relations ...”

“... 2011, the MSC broke the cardinal rule of journalism and gave the Met details of Sun sources who may have been public officials. For years News International had blocked inquiries into hacking at the News of the World; now it was volunteering evidence about corruption at the Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be ...”

“... have to pack their bags and head out eventually – which they did, when the Phoney War ended in May 1940. In the meantime foreboding was blunted by a fatal propensity to look on the bright sight. Illusions died or lingered on in different ways for different people. A couple of years earlier, in a letter to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Simone de Beauvoir had ...”

“... instances of his using the ideas of others as a jumping-off point for fresh composition. It may seem strange that he needed to do this, but it involves a creative process, not simple larceny. Or is there? Is there – for me – a difference between what Dean calls ‘creative process’ and ‘simple larceny’? Or rather, between creative process and ...”

“... choice. Policies that allow individuals to hold onto their money and do with it what they like may be economically efficient, but they are not particularly fair: many people will end up with less than they need and perhaps than they deserve. Progressive taxes, which are more equitable, are nevertheless not so efficient at generating future wealth. You ...”

“... treated in the aftermath of the First World War those democratising trends might have prevailed. I may not have seen any connection between what I was being taught and the ideology that lay behind the Cold War and American involvement in Vietnam, but others certainly did. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group of young, left-leaning academics ...”

“... cloud’ that impedes his destiny? – at least it is the mark of something. So this character may be grandiose in his ambition, but also in his fatalism. And isn’t that phrase ‘tiny black cloud’ done with great finesse? It hints at a man whose sense of himself has so swelled that he now sees himself geographically, like a darkened area experiencing ...”

“... revising both their theory and their practice. (They are the true ‘revisionists’!) Freud may be dead, as regularly announced in newspapers and magazines, but who can deny that psychoanalysis itself is alive and well, changing, adapting, expanding – i.e. progressing? The argument is clever, but it hides a fallacy. For who, except the psychoanalysts ...”

“... own living; nor could they divorce their husband or limit the number of children they had. Theirs may have been a gilded cage, but they were nevertheless imprisoned and silenced by fear – ‘the fear that forbids freedom in the private house’. They were afraid of the male aggression that surfaced in the angry opposition with which the majority of men met ...”