“... her ‘the rough draught of a certain famous line in the “Characters of Women” ’. Woolf may have intended her mock-biography as an affectionate portrait of Vita Sackville-West, but Isobel Grundy is surely right in thinking that these episodes in Orlando’s career were primarily inspired by the life and letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Of ...”

“... Verse, like coins, mint strictly, precisely, honestly. Follow the rule stubbornly: So that words may be compact, Thoughts – expansive... How then does Mackay Brown go about his new-minting process? In the first place, he uses the opportunities of narrative to return the figurative to the concrete. Scarcely have we had the disquisition on the worn state of ...”

“... literary debate. Intellectual culture thrives upon debate. Although opponents of deconstruction may accuse it of nihilism and anti-humanism, nothing could be more humanistic than vigorous arguments about the nature and aim of literature. Deconstruction has forced traditionalists to look to their assumptions and protect their theoretical flanks. Defensive ...”

“... the two lovers have driven through a curfew blockade. (This is one of the two places where you may feel got at by underlined meanings too obvious to be worth noticing. The other point is at the second entry of the Strauss song, when Billy madly types out his St Luke-cum-Tolstoy question, ‘What then shall we do?’ and Kiri Te Kanawa is boosted far beyond ...”

“... and found it to be at a very low ebb. Perhaps he should have looked a little farther. The water may be receding over the mudflats on his stretch of coast, but round the corner it is flooding strongly. The black tide that Freud was so afraid of in the early years of the century has been making a steady advance. When I was a boy no one knew the signs of the ...”

“... Lewin succeeded in winning War Cabinet authority for a change in the Rules of Engagement on 2 May to allow hunter-killer submarine attacks on any Argentine surface ships outside Argentine territorial waters. That was how the General Belgrano came to be destroyed later the same day despite the fact that London knew it had been heading toward home waters ...”

“... In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of return on capital; managers who failed to achieve this target would be sacked. The report, drafted by the MP Nicholas Ridley, recognised that the pressures to economise would inevitably threaten management-union conflict ...”

“... and ignorance of the Treasury knights, who, again in Macmillan’s words, ‘see the error which may be committed by doing something, and therefore...say “let us commit the crowning error of not doing anything at all.” ’ Of course, even in 1935 public expenditure was hardly a negligible element in the nation’s transactions. It accounted for some 25 ...”

“... among analytic philosophers (he is often referred to as ‘the smartest philosopher in America’) may, at this point, still expect that these large questions will, as usual, rapidly be reformulated so as to abandon the non-technical level at which they were initially asked. But the very next paragraph shifts the tone. ‘Our various questions,’ Nozick ...”

“... is the real danger for the professional historian that if he writes an outstanding biography, it may, even now, become a best-seller. For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which ...”

“... but someone who would respond with appropriate bonhomie to a gentleman’s confidences: ‘You may be thinking that when Myrtle and Robert made up to each other I made fun of it, and that when Myrtle made up tome I solemnly took it all in. You are quite right.’ With a little practice, of course, one comes to respond to this respectful consideration. The ...”

“... and has therefore chosen to let his own work be beyond his understanding.’ That ‘therefore’ may well give us pause. The corresponding attitude for the reader is perhaps stated when Pilgermann and his friend discuss the tiled design they have built in Antioch: ‘May it not be that the best way of conducting oneself ...”

“... This, while not overt class struggle, was undertaken precisely to avoid such struggle, and one may well argue therefore that class conflict between masters and slaves was a determinant of behaviour. (For an analogy, consider the behaviour of the Polish authorities between December 1970 and August 1980: although there was little overt struggle against the ...”

“... literary touch is far from certain. Take, for instance, the conclusion. It is sententious, but we may feel that two hundred thousand laborious words have earned the author the right to pontificate on the final page. ‘ “Our prerogatives as men,” wrote the young Auden, “Will be cancelled who knows when ... ?”, if we cannot radically alter our ...”

“... there should be a meeting again between Jasper, Neville and at least the corpse of Edwin – which may be what is depicted in the bottom centre vignette in the Fildes frontispiece.Whether or not Dickens was writing a positive whodunit, he was prompted, I think, to experiment with narrative method by the dovetailed first-person narratives, the one filling in ...”