“... phrase, is said to be delineated more clearly here than in earlier accounts. The claim may be conceded: but not all veils are drawn aside. In 1896 Churchill was ‘an intolerable nuisance’, according to Birkenhead, in his fruitless efforts to avoid the ‘tedious land of India’ and to scramble into a scene of military action and glory. We are ...”

“... manager breathing down their necks, and the surviving independents with modest annual turnovers, may well discover new talent as they always have in the past. But they will have great difficulty in holding on to that talent. Author loyalty can be strong, but is rarely strong enough to withstand six-figure inducements. Small independent publishers will become ...”

“... and phrase-books in rare cases of need. Cameras are customary, but not essential. Movie-cameras may be used, but natives sometimes resent them. Travel may now be impossible, but travel-writing is, perhaps for that reason, much prized. To be a travel-writer, one must explore a far-flung, outlandish place and report the ...”

“... field open to him was psychology. Furious at the time, he now writes that ‘in retrospect all may have been for the best ... Competition in the hard sciences is much fiercer than in psychology’ and ‘it turned out to be quite easy to be a big fish in a small pond.’ In this ‘excessively easy’ new field Eysenck adopted a strategy ‘perhaps not to ...”

“... neighbours and associates was so common as to be considered normal. In the light of this book, we may have to consider whether this is not also a part of the British way of life. According to the authors, Henry Kerby, a Tory MP, reported to MI5 on his fellow Parliamentarians. George Wigg, a Labour MP, told MI5 all he could find out about what was going on in ...”

“... is often the best adjective he can find for a woman; it is a trait more often valued in dogs. He may despise the women who cross his path, but doesn’t refuse them. George Devine, who was such an influence on his career, would ‘pull on his pipe lingeringly at the sight of a pretty girl’; Osborne was also a pipe-man. Back in his Gay croft School days he ...”

“... regret to say that this Edenic oasis is no exception. (An incautious nine-iron shot, for instance, may loft one’s ball into the abutting refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila; a mishap which the well-liked professional, Mr ‘Sami’ Ibrahim, counts as an extra stroke.) Other unwelcome reminders are not wanting. The honours boards tell their own distressing ...”

“... three schools of thought on this issue, with much variation within them. One school, which we may call the nomothetic realists, holds that (ideal) psychology consists of an explanatory set of content-involving causal laws: psychology is just one more special science, but one in which intentional properties are the domain of interest, as factual and nomic ...”

“... sound systems, bright lights and electrical paraphernalia of a Western rock concert. The artists may have worn national costume but the tempo was pure MTV. This was a populist display on the part of the state. President Landsbergis spoke and went early, leaving the music to the huge crowd which kept growing right up to the final firework display. Only during ...”

“... the sixth move, different games start to move along different paths. The difference at this stage may be tiny – a bishop goes one square further – but the game may by that action be tilted towards a very different finale. The position of the pieces on the board after fifty moves is, in some sense, a consequence of what ...”

“... virtues – personal modesty, public order, a sense of duty – preserved in the East. There may have been a bit of truth in that in the early Seventies – by the late Eighties it had all gone. According to a survey of workers’ morale, 36 per cent enjoyed ‘high job satisfaction’ in 1967, 24 per cent in 1987. In 1967, 42 per cent said they missed ...”

“... known, then this should be made clear. It would seem that country-house archives and other sources may yet yield good material for a more scholarly examination of such matters. So while the gardener and the cook in me found many points of interest, the historian found herself bristling with questions, almost all of which remained unanswered. How did the head ...”

“... been written by the inmate of a lunatic asylum. Why this alleged fact was found worthy of remark may not be immediately obvious to the outsider, but I suspect that the moral of the story was that the madman, though deranged, had, through the grace of God, never lost contact with the great truth that no account of the divine love will ever be definitive. And ...”

“... or literature the man of letters did at least say straight out what he thought, however much he may have been conditioned to think it. He did not compel a work of art to understand, indeed to create, itself: he gave his own response to it, his own awareness of approval, curiosity or dislike, which he could justify only in part or not at all, since they came ...”

“... that ‘even among families known for their support of puritanism,’ attachment to predestination may not have been as strong as it seemed. The point is worth arguing, and Dr Sharpe gives us three examples. The first is the Earl of Huntingdon, though he does not tell us which Earl. Since, as he has stressed elsewhere, successive Earls held very different ...”