“... on what he regards as the abuse of old words. Professional linguists take a calmer view, and may even go beyond the limits of mere description and argue that change can tend to renovation rather than decadence. The State of the Language is a large and defeatingly miscellaneous collection which represents these points of view and a great many more ...”

“... David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind quickened from torpor by such speculations as ‘What happened to all the water in Noah’s Flood?’ or ‘Can the beatings of a butterfly’s wings start a typhoon?’ or, on a more practical level, ‘Could I have dealt with a mischievous fireball in the kitchen as summarily as that (unnamed) Smethwick housewife who “courageously sent it packing, and suffered nothing more serious than a burnt frock”?’ Still less does it assist slumber to reflect on the implications of that 1990 Sun headline (surely the longest Sun headline ever written) which said: ‘Britain has gone sex-crazy as red-hot lovers rush to do it in the great outdoors, say experts ...”

“... David Lockwood is the sociologist’s sociologist in the same way that Ken Rosewall used to be the tennis player’s tennis player: he’s the one the other pros turn out to watch. But you need to know the fixture list. To switch to an older metaphor, he is apt not only to hide his light under a bushel but to hide the bushel as well ...”

“... while more beautiful, is decidedly less representative. The attempt to cope with this deprivation may account for some of the awkwardnesses in the installation. The felicitous parts tend to come in the galleries which consist of a single nine-metre-square module, such as those containing works on paper and the room presenting medium-sized paintings of ...”

“... George recorded. Some, of course, felt the same about Clarence. His intended consort was Princess May of Teck, a royal in a million, who it was hoped would pull him together. On his premature (and extremely fortunate) demise, she married Prince George instead. The rest of his life was a succession of such fantasy worlds. Both Alexandra and her daughter ...”

“... that none was as important as was once thought seems a curiously myopic way to proceed. Railways may not have been ‘indispensable’: but they were still, apparently, more important than any other single ‘factor’ mentioned in this book. The heroic events may not have been typical: but, as the cover eloquently ...”

“... and drunkenness are unlikely to be tolerated (how they will be policed is another matter). Beer may be the drug of choice at men’s football matches in Europe and Latin America, but having experienced the collective euphoria of watching England’s women winning the European Championships at Wembley this summer without encountering a single drunk or ...”

“... it the wealthiest club in the world, or at least the club with the wealthiest backers, which may not be the same thing. None of these teams has needed to move to follow the money. Instead, the money has come to them. What these new owners seem to want from English football is a stake in a glamorous and dynamic business with vast global appeal. This means ...”

“... indirect style, but his slightly stagey horror at the likely excesses of the first-person mode may nonetheless strike a chord with readers of a variety of free-running or confessional forms, not just novels (think Christmas circular letters). But what about autobiography or memoir? Surely here self-revelation is of the essence. Yet James’s stricture ...”

“... individualism to an imperial appetite and the project of continental expansion. Turner’s insight may sound like common sense: once the last frontier has closed, Americans will have to teach themselves how to live, and at just that point the New World will cease to be new. But we have never come to that point, says Fisher. He is pretty sure we never will. And ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... quest for national self-determination; nor will Israelis concede that Zionism, however good it may have been for the Jews, has inflicted great suffering on the Arabs of Palestine and still continues to do so. Conversely, the Palestinians have so far been entirely unable to reconcile themselves to Zionism as a genuine movement of Jewish national ...”

“... they were not tortured: they held very different beliefs about the supernatural. Confessions may be tainted by having been extracted through torture, but the verbatim record of interrogations can still tell us a good deal about the beliefs, and (as Lyndal Roper has shown) the psychic dramas, of the accused. Of the dozen books discussed here, Clark’s ...”

“... of the entrepreneurial spirit to the rise of literary criticism. And yet it sounds so curious. We may worry about imports, like Henry Ryecroft, but we don’t infer morality from butter. We may worry about war, like Lord Salisbury, but we don’t infer rivalry between nations from a Darwinian rivalry between species. Those ...”

“... and episcopal apparatus of the Church. The Archbishop clearly thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on ...”