“... slightly bemused words of the Ministry of Labour, of ‘unrest paralysed by patriotism – or, it may be, of patriotism paralysed by unrest’. There were some bad moments: in the summer of 1918, thanks to a miniature general strike involving even the London Police, the dead lay unburied in England as well as in France. As the war progressed, the ‘Us and ...”

“... he was concerned less with inferring qualities of sensibility than with unmasking ideologies. It may be, however, that his work on language will prove to have been his most distinctive achievement. It emerges from his perception that certain items of our conceptual vocabulary – the ‘keywords’ – offer an unrivalled register of the historical changes ...”

“... to see you too, considering the fact that your little darling only has one eye now. ‘Army’ may not be a very good poem but it’s altogether preferable to the sentimental sludge and slurry of Duffy’s other juvenilia – you realise that here she has discovered her much-praised talent, her gift for imagining and recording voices that are not her ...”

“... I feel like the man who shot Bambi,’ said Alan Sugar in May 1993, shortly after sacking Terry Venables from his job as manager and ‘chief executive’ of Spurs. Sugar presumably meant Bambi’s mum. Bambi, as everybody knows, is still alive, still kicking, and now manager of England. For a crack shot like Alan Sugar, it must be galling indeed to see his quarry frisking on the fabled Wembley sward: no longer wet-nosed and shaky-legged, perhaps, but still thoroughly adored ...”

“... now earns his crust by penning self-serving memoirs of the Thirties, Highwood says to him: ‘I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the Thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one that didn’t completely ignore me.’ At moments like this, we might be tempted to diagnose a ...”

“... to the notion that the world was ‘essentially’ good, he failed to find an answer. This may all have had something to do with his upbringing by a severe but passionately emotional mother, who seems to have instilled into him as a child a sense of sinfulness that must have been unbearable. Younghusband left government service in 1909: his career had ...”

“... likely to happen. Accordingly, stories about their rough passage into adulthood stay singular, and may be forgiven, but rarely remembered or loved. Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, her best work to date, is an intelligent coming-of-age story whose power stems partly from its indifference to the expectation that teenage girls be either deferent ...”

“... In fact, of course, nothing of the sort has been shown; nor will it be. Bald naturalism may, for all philosophers know, be viable after all. That may strike you as comforting if, like me, you find McDowell’s efforts to formulate a pluralistic alternative rather less convincing. I guess I am a hairy ...”

“... serpents ... Little alligators of ecstasy, that’s what zippers are.’ And so on. Some readers may be disappointed by Friedel’s sceptical approach to all those saloon bar zipper stories – the woman squeezing her way to her seat in the theatre and finding her dress, or hair, trapped in a stranger’s zip; or the man who, adjusting his zip stealthily at ...”

“... contaminated by mingled feelings of rivalry and anxiety’; and ‘to have a history, therefore, may not be quite so advantageous as some feminists have proposed.’ While in the past 15 years feminist criticism has flourished, expanded and succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its pioneers, and is now an accepted part of the critical repertoire, studied ...”

“... God Himself. As Lewis notes, this would be ‘a claim of far-reaching implications’. Indeed, it may have implications for the fundamentalist Muslim Khilafa movement so active in Britain today. Chapter Six of The Arabs in History was prefaced by a quotation from Rimbaud’s Illuminations, though its title, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, echoed that of ...”

“... history with a half-baked curriculum of Third World and Afrocentric studies. European history may have brought this fate on itself, but non-European history deserved a great deal better. What is ‘Europe’? What is ‘European Civilisation’? Davies is a sturdy original, and china shops bring out the bull in him as they did in his master, Alan ...”

“... no Modernist by persuasion: Michelangelo and Poussin are my cup of tea.’ This may be a joke. He does cite with approval a remark of Adrian Stokes to the effect that ‘modern art, the art typical of our day, is the slang, so to speak, of art as a whole, standing in relation to the Old Masters as does slang to ordinary language,’ adding ...”

“... Singapore and by the well-organised supply lines on the Ho Chi Minh trail in the Vietnam War. It may well be that the real heyday of the bicycle will come only when the world’s fossil fuels run down. ‘In Asia alone,’ Dodge writes, ‘bicycles transport more people than do all of the world’s automobiles,’ and China ‘produces more than 40 per cent ...”

“... assumes a largely anthropological readership, and a concomitant level of knowledge: an outsider may find the rather lengthy discussions of technical aspects of kinship not always riveting. A less austere account of the lives of the anthropologists might have made up for this. Stocking notes that at the LSE Malinowski was not content with supervising his ...”