“... of commerce. Schreiner was attracted by the energetic power of the empire-building Cecil John Rhodes, yet she was one of the first to smell mercenary exploitation. While Cape politicians, including her brother and leading Afrikaner Bondsmen, were still sycophantic and the Jameson Raid on Oom Paul Kruger’s gold-rich republic was still to come, she ...”

“... and compelling fiction – flourish in Holland in the 17th century? A simple answer is supplied by John Berger. The world in European realist art is ‘rendered up to the spectator owner’. There is an emphasis on the tactile, and the framed easel picture, conceived of as a window or a mirror, is also like ‘a safe let into the wall, in which the visible has ...”

“... trench warfare on the Western Front. Professor Graham’s theme is the one endlessly inculcated by John Terraine and now finding wider acceptance among military historians: that the British Army’s great series of victories in 1918 should be seen as the ‘pay-off’ for lessons painfully learned in the previous three years. The early British offensives, made ...”

“... He has come a long way. Born the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, he inevitably became by public-school nickname ‘Wedgie’ and later, by his own socialist deed-poll, plain ‘Tony Benn’. Today he is more often referred to simply as Benn – a hard word spat out like ‘Lenin’. Benn puzzles and alarms people because he is at the same time frightfully English and frighteningly un-English ...”

“... transcended party politics. Of course there were exceptions. No Tory MP joined Stuart Holland and John Fraser in their criticism of the Police in Brixton, and no Labour MP supported Winston Churchill’s call for an end to immigration. Between these poles, however, there was agreement that the British Police should not arm themselves like the French CRS, that ...”

“... past, not of the yet-to-be-experienced future. It is the world of the past which constitutes what John Bowlby has called ‘the environment of adaptiveness’. And, as Alice discovered when she observed the croquet game in Wonderland, outside the environment of adaptiveness anything can happen. Examples abound, not merely in fantasies and ...”

“... though) gains admission: the thoughts of Pound, Aiken, Leavis, D. W. Harding, Helen Gardner, John Crowe Ransom, Hugh Kenner and Davie shine again. But there is a lot of dross, and there are too many ill-judged omissions. If Stevie Smith’s piece on Murder in the Cathedral fails to be a review, it succeeds in being admirably inaugurative. Even the ...”

“... because he had been a real original, not a standard-issue stereotype British eccentric like John Betjeman, who had been Richards’s immediate predecessor. But the Shand stories were nothing like as marvellous as the legends about ‘de Cronin’, ‘H.deC.’, ‘Ivor de Wolfe’ (as he nommed himself de plume) or – to the very oldest servants of the ...”

“... mostly snippety truisms preserved in the most boring of ancient books, the Moral Extracts of John Stobaeus. Astydamas the Younger wrote an Antigone; it was produced in 341 BC, and that is all we know. These plays went the way of most books, as the Roman Empire sank into piety and inflation. Astydamas was too late to be rated Classical, and vanished ...”

“... But for enlightenment on the subject readers will have to turn to the first two chapters of John Ramsden’s excellent volume on the history of the party from 1902 to 1940. Whatever their merits, biographies hold for readers an indestructible core of interest. Story is more deeply rooted in our minds than theory, and the life-cycle is the oldest story ...”

“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”

“... as much and forgive as much as Yates, or Salinger (whom he particularly admires), or Updike, or John Cheever, must be a tiring business. In Yates’s Builders there is a writer, Bob Prentice, who knows that too much sensitivity is a mistake, and upsets the readers. Prentice, however, is an unsuccessful writer. Yates, an expert in painful details and ...”

“... for Britain’s diplomats. In a sense they were: the other countries needed no reminding that John Major had a general election in front of him and a nationalist Mrs Thatcher close behind. But if in the short run the opt-out clauses largely silenced the Thatcherite opposition, in longer perspective they were a triumph for humbug. No one had ever ...”

“... to her heirs. Perhaps I inherited it from her, for I am, as you know, a Habsburg bastard like Don John of Austria, through Franz I and my grandmother – things like that often crop up much later. All the notes have to say about this rich and strange passage is that Kokoschka’s ideas about Joanna the Mad and Charles V are expounded in his play about ...”

“... could transform it for posterity into an earlier version of Dunkirk. ‘To the last,’ writes John North in his 1936 history, it was ‘a singularly brainless and suicidal type of warfare.’ After the worst debacle of all, when General Stopford’s inertia threw away any chance of success in the crucial Allied landings at Suvla Bay, while the commander ...”