“... is to rescue ‘socialism’ from the charge that it is the antithesis of liberty or freedom. Arthur Lewis’s famous axiom that ‘socialism is about equality,’ he says is true, but only partly true. Equality is a means, not an end in itself. Without much more equality than we have at the moment, a large proportion of the population cannot enjoy ...”

“... abortion rate suggests that ‘dating’ in this period implied more than a walk in the park. In Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei (sometimes translated as Flirtation), such relationships have little consequence for the prosperous Fritz and his friend Theodor in fin-de-siècle Vienna (so long as the woman isn’t married ...”

“... is also reprinted in A Celebration. It compares him, not very illuminatingly, with Conrad but does little to characterise him as a writer.At the Architectural Review in the 1930s, James Richards had found editing Pevsner’s articles hard work. By the end of the war he was fluent, but his use of English retains a sense of discovery and the flexibility of a ...”

“... than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when New Worlds – a former fanzine which the ...”

“... of the Firth of Forth towards Edinburgh, where his political career had begun. He said and wrote little for public consumption about the reasons his administration had failed, after seeming to start so well. Journalists and voters turned their attention to the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition, while his own party moved away from Brownite politics, under a ...”

“... might David Selznick have made better movies? Ronald Haver asks no such question. He spends as little time exploring Selznick’s feelings as he does evaluating his films or examining why Gone with the Wind wowed Middle America. When he does refer to anyone’s private life, he adopts gossip-writers’ phrases like ‘romantically involved’. And although ...”

“... rivalries were disingenuous. They were amateurs, to be sure, but neurotically-driven amateurs with little love for one another, and scarcely more lovable to us than their contemporary, the unspeakable Sir Thomas Phillipps, the monomaniac who ruthlessly amassed and guarded what was reputed to be the hugest collection of manuscripts ever owned by a private ...”

“... mass membership. It was the familiar story of small dedicated groups whose exertions ‘bore no little resemblance to the labours of Sisyphus’, and frustration fanned the wranglings that went on between them and the national leadership. Meanwhile the England fit for heroes to live in remained an ignis fatuus. After 1945 there was substantial change: a ...”

“... causes which lead to the advance of morality’, concluded that ‘natural selection effects but little’ and looked instead to such things as ‘the approbation of our fellow-men’ and ‘example and imitation’. Much later, when the mechanism of natural selection had come to be understood in greater depth and detail than had been possible for Darwin ...”

“... he was passionately and very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the ...”

“... it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to him. He read Malory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with Spenser, William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, and several popular novels set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was ...”

“... technical. He rightly saw – he discovered in practice – that his art would amount to precious little if he couldn’t find ways to keep the specifically English forms of landscape mooning alive in his colour and space. One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti ...”

“... him around for a year. Each morning, he later told John Gerassi, he would greet them: ‘My little ones, how did you sleep?’ He got used to the crabs, but other sea creatures – molluscs in particular – remained objects of horror. Sliminess had something to do with it. Being and Nothingness (1943) concludes with the idea of the visqueux. Sliminess ...”

“... that vagrants lead lives almost as complex as those of cultural commissars. Pete Townshend’s little collection of stories, released on the same label, did not require a pundit to explain how a deaf ex-addict rock musician brought back the goods from his twenty-year nightmare of fame and lunacy. A chess-playing wino? That’s another ball-game. The ...”

“... to his theme the work of Sir Leonard Woolley. As it happens, my father was a relative of Sir Arthur Evans, who led the excavation of Knossos, and Woolley was Evans’s deputy for a period. As secretary to Sir William Willcocks, the Imperial engineer responsible for the construction of dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates, my father was in a position to ...”