“... by the Dutch group ING with their demands for 1994 bonuses. As a result of the Barings case, we may be about to witness changes in the only commodities market which is dependably bullish, the trade in City slang. After the golden handshake and the golden parachute, it may be time to welcome the golden roadblock and say ...”

“... calls to mind, in politics, sport or the cycle of crime and punishment, but in fields where it may be found sublimated or turned into constructive channels, like science, education or entrepreneurship. The aim is less to catalogue its appearances, however, than to understand how the men and women of the 19th-century middle classes coped with it, by ...”

“... Forster, whom F.R. Leavis accused of ‘not knowing how serious he was’. And our trouble today may be that because we take seriousness seriously we take Bloomsbury too seriously. Virginia Woolf has become an icon, academically hagiographic. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, is out because he is not in our sense a serious writer – deliberately not, one ...”

“... It may be off-putting to think that great artists create to excite themselves sexually; yet in some degree this is probably the case. At least with quite a number. Although the obvious danger would then be including almost every artistic effect under the heading of the pornographic (‘everything he does is so artistic,’ as Anthony Powell remarked of Lawrence’s gamekeeper, quoting a song of Marie Lloyd’s), it might be tempting to construct a General Theory of Pornography in Art along these lines ...”

“... he does have stories and characters drawn from those later years. This book is about the child who may or may not have turned out to be the father of the man: I have worked hard, despite myself and in defiance of augury, which had me down in my youth as a wallower and a welterer, a Queen’s Own Scottish Loiterer. Every so ...”

“... potential opponents of the regime, though the excessive number of graduates in religious studies may spell future trouble. There are many Saudis, with experience of the wider world, who yet value the conventions, restraint and discipline, made sweeter of course by the luxuries of Saudi living. This no doubt is one of the reasons that the rule of the House of ...”

“... probably says something about either the American legal system or the American media, though it may just stem from the fact that 80 per cent of the privately educated college students in the Baby Boom generation almost went to law school. (The other 20 per cent did go to law school.)Lawyer jokes aside (as a category of American humour, they take up a file ...”

“... snobbery and restrictive practice (so long as the tradition of live performance continues) may play a part. Aristophanes makes jokes about books, Plato insists on the values of the ear (the book, he remarks in the Phaedrus, is not interactive) – the culture of reading can be seen, even in the fifth century, as a fad of the avant-garde. This did not ...”

“... hideous farming practices and carcinogenic substances, and so in one way her fall from office may be deplored. Just as much to be deplored, however, is her dream Britain with its population of lean deluded prigs, an Erewhon society where the sick are punished. Time may show that it was, indeed, all a practical joke, and ...”

“... and politics followed the shopping basket. The view here displayed of the history of our islands may appear strange, even hostile, to many English historians. Professor Kearney refers to a recent conversation with a tutor at Cambridge in which the tutor explained how his college did its best to prevent students developing an interest in Scottish, Welsh or ...”

“... to show the building in oblique perspective. Time and weather are acknowledged – the building may even be in ruins. You do not understand the building so much as imagine what it would be like to stand in one particular place – the perspectivist’s station-point – at one particular time of day. High Modernism, like Palladianism, was in love with the ...”

“... star had subsequently waned, not least as a result of persecution by both French and Japanese. In May 1941, they established the Vietnam Independence League, or Viet Minh, as a front for activity in the new wartime context, yet a year before the August 1945 uprising they were still a small, persecuted group, ‘a minor irritant to the French authorities, and ...”

“... It did the same the other week while I was reading the personal ads in Private Eye. In what we may as well call ‘the old days’ there used occasionally to be coded pleas from girls needing money for an abortion. Nowadays they’re advertising for everything, and requesting sums it’s less easy to unravel. In this issue of the Eye, for instance, there ...”

“... paintings look staged. No matter how natural the girl pouring milk or the woman making lace may seem, the perfection of the surface, the exquisitely precise placing of the figure – so balanced, so quiet – betrays an organising hand. De Hooch, who never achieved that degree of control, has left more of the smell of reality. He seems to have had a ...”

“... and desire targets it, emotion tints or colours it: it enlivens it or darkens it, as the case may be.’ Without the map that belief provides, there would be nothing for desire to target; and without the targets that desires provide, there would be neither the satisfaction nor the frustration from which emotion as an attitude could form. However distinct ...”