“... thesis informs the whole. ‘Our book is constructed,’ so its authors tell us, ‘of seven major constellations and a few minor ones, arranged in chronological order, preceded by two exordia, one methodological and the other mythological, the whole crowned with a prophetical peroration.’ Classical Utopianism is relegated to the mythological ...”

“... was a geopolitical event well worth his attention, and it became the subject of two of his three major novels, Les Conquérants (1928) and La Condition humaine (1933). The first of these, which is set in Canton, was written before he ever set foot in China, but what he’d seen of Hong Kong and Saigon was enough to supply the novel with its ample urban ...”

“... that night. It’s no surprise to learn that Black has had his troubles with depression. The other major shareholders of Ravelston had no children. After their deaths, Black befriended their widows, and persuaded them to align their votes with his. Before long he was able to take control of Ravelston, and borrowed the money to buy out the other ...”

“... on the Times in the London Library. The name that stirred my memories and regrets most was Canon John Collins, who died on New Year’s Eve. John Collins was that very rare thing: a good man. He was not particularly a rebel or a radical. He was very conventional in many of his ways, as in being a Canon of St Paul’s. But ...”

“... and as philosophers of social-scientific method. The comparison becomes almost a reflex in John Hall’s outstanding biography: ‘Gellner’s understanding and account of modern cognition were profoundly Weberian’; ‘No modern thinker has stood so close to Weber in insisting that our times must be disenchanted’; Gellner’s account is ‘Weberian ...”

“... midwinter drama of A Doll’s House. The incongruity between the stark Scandinavian gloom of the major plays and the Mediterranean lushness of the places where Ibsen wrote them is a warning against reading the art too readily from the life, and one that Robert Ferguson has not heeded. For him, the life is the only way to support his thesis, which is that the ...”

“... of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read Rupert Brooke near the graves of a major and a private, and muses thus: ‘I cannot help thinking of the two together and of the greater value of the one. What a pity it is that the same little piece of lead takes away as easily a brilliant life and one that is merely vegetation. The democracy of ...”

“... the style may have seemed startling, but the content surely did not. Even the angels, the one major feature not explained by the Gospels, would have been familiar from earlier representations of the story. In the past they had usually been shown praying or reverently holding Christ’s clothes, so Piero’s group, apparently based on an antique statue of ...”

“... Eamonn McCann, ‘the Lord Chief Justice were appointed as a one-person tribunal to inquire into a major political problem affecting Ireland, there would be a rattle of empty laughter throughout the land.’ That, he says, is a ‘measure of how far the British judiciary has fallen in esteem over the last twenty years’. There was absolutely no laughter ...”

“... Sten guns, Home Guard pikes and Montecristo cigars, listening to quadrophonic recordings of the major speeches in His own voice, peering into side-chapels dedicated to His companions (Beaverbrook, Birkenhead, Bracken), the average gent thrown into despair by the latest debacle of the British economy could swiftly revive his flagging spirits. Then on his way ...”

“... A major in the Royal Anglian Regiment talks to Tony Parker about battle: I’ve only been in that kind of situation where someone’s been shooting at me, a total of about twelve times altogether – in Ireland, in Aden, and we had a couple of dust-ups with the Eoka lot in Cyprus. You get a little bit of headiness out of the situation, you do, because that’s what you’ve been trained for ...”

“... interpreter to a high military officer of a Warsaw Pact country, then watch it.’ On 31 May 1944, Major Frank Thompson, wearing the British uniform that should have protected him, was captured along with the Bulgarian Partisans to whom he was attached, near Likatova, north of Sofia, found guilty at a staged trial, and publicly shot on 5 June. His bearing ...”

“... well attended by the public and extensively reported in the press. Around a dozen of them became major news stories and it was not unknown for the Times to devote an entire issue to a case. Though the commission potentially offered a means to reassert control over family property, it also involved washing dirty linen in public, with the attendant risk that ...”

“... habitual and resigned. And this explains what would otherwise be the puzzling fact that the two major influences on English theatre in the last twenty five years have been those polar opposite, apparently – Brecht and Beckett. Beckett’s icy clarity leaves no room for doubt. The human enterprise is doomed; we play games while we wait for the end. When ...”

“... a briefly informative introduction. My only cavil concerns the arrangement of the edition. All the major public addresses of the LCS were precisely dated, but in the case of some of its minor publications we know only the year of their appearance. For this reason Davis has arranged them by year of publication, but, within each year, in alphabetical order; this ...”