“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... finds it less moving than the comparatively stark German work and perhaps the reason for this may be a certain dissatisfaction with Terraine’s approach. Hessler, addressing specialists, cannot be too close to his subject. Terraine, addressing the general public, can. When one has spent years of one’s life reading about U-boats it is no doubt hard to ...”

“... On 25 May 1851 Dickens wrote no fewer than 11 letters – or perhaps it is better to say that 11 of those he wrote have survived. Several were only a line or two, declining an invitation to a public dinner at the Royal Literary Fund, thanking a theatre manager for the use of the stage for rehearsals of his amateur players, and the like ...”

“... Catholic-Stalinist-Fascist-Pacifist intellectuals is one of them. While what he says about them may be ‘true’, it is just that in the wider scheme of things they were not worth all that truth-telling. Orwell, of course, also had much bigger targets in his sights, and he often hit them right in the middle, but it is nonetheless the case that much of his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lectures in philosophy. McKitterick, who reproduces the single extant sheet, suggests that it may not even have been completed. But the enterprise continued and Thomas went on to publish William Temple’s edition of Ramus’s Dialectica, Georg Sabinus’s commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and English and Continental theologians. His intellectual ...”

“... were fighting and dying deep inside Iraq in an effort to stop the Scuds being fired at Israel – may not be far from the truth. The facts about the human results of the war are still denied us by the generals, even if the sufferings of a few selected groups of men and women are revealed. Thus the brutality meted out to the Kuwaitis by Iraqi occupation forces ...”

“... Max (now Lord) Beloff after Harold Laski’s death in 1950, ‘that ... the future historian may talk of the period between 1920 and 1950 as the “The Age of Laski.”’ Thirty-seven years later a leading historian of the Labour Party observed that ‘Laski’s time and reputation have gone into almost total eclipse.’ How did a thinker, writer and ...”

“... its own walls. That is to say, its own structure is objectively the same as the universal. It may be conscious of this in different degrees. But it has no immediate access to universality, it does not look at it, as it were.’ Elsewhere, he claimed that works of art don’t exist in parallel to the world ‘outside’, but both remain subject to society ...”

“... the world was well lost. Nor would all Fox’s friends have agreed that they were. ‘Mr Fox may finish his History and his friends may go to the Devil,’ growled one of them who resented the repeated failures of Parliamentary leadership. The claim that Fox achieved a profound insight into the true worth of power ...”

“... heroine hires the nanny merely because she wants to build an elaborate greenhouse on her property may be meant to sidestep the issue of working mothers, but this implausible plotting only makes the act of employing a surrogate seem all the more arbitrary and self-indulgent. Each time the camera lingers lovingly on another tasteful detail of the family’s ...”

“... intruding into the GDR; the danger that illusions about the character of West German imperialism may increase and that its character as the main disturber of European peace may become obscured; the danger that in tactical matters a differentiation will be applied between individual socialist countries.’ The paper ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Engels described the scene in the centre of Manchester on a Saturday night: ‘Intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter.’ The habits of the citizens of Manchester are unchanged. Going out is still a high ...”