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“... appeal. Where Sampson wants to make the ‘revolution as bloodless and manageable as possible’, John Saul is primarily concerned with its socialist outcome.* His account deals with familiar instances of repression and resistance, which he tends to romanticise as only foreign sympathisers can. It smacks of condescension when a tenured Toronto academic ...”

“... as an alternative, to formal marriage; and it caused a change in both moral attitudes and in the laws about divorce, which is now no more than a swift, cheap, morally neutral, no-fault administrative procedure. As a result, a half of all marriages in America and a third in England will today end in divorce. In addition, an unknown but large number of couples ...”

“... The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length with a giant collar, but Dr Pozzi easily ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”

“... 19th-century statesmen. But he stayed on for another 19 years, imprinting his personality on the laws, foreign policy and institutions of the new Germany. He saw that the foundation of the new empire was the beginning, not the end, of the process of unification and he had no intention of leaving that task in less capable hands. As imperial ...”

“... the Russells also gave Britain its last Whig prime minister, Conrad’s great-grandfather, Lord John Russell, later the first Earl Russell, who governed as a Whig from 1846 to 1852 and afterwards as a Liberal. If his own family history helped to bring into focus the indeterminacy of political commitments on the eve of the Civil War, it was his encyclopedic ...”

“... the Liberal Party of Herbert Asquith. Further schisms followed. The Liberal Nationals, under Sir John Simon, joined the National Government of 1931 and continued for the next thirty years co-operating closely with the Conservatives. Under the Woolton-Teviot Agreement of 1947 the Liberal Nationals changed their name, confusingly, to the National Liberals, and ...”

“... in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit . . . We hate to have laws made for us at a distance. We wish people would allow us to right ourselves, instead of continually meddling, with their imperfect legislation. We stand up for self-government, and oppose centralisation. When Lord Morpeth sought to expand the role of the ...”

“... sinfulness, until Jesus finally shows mercy and lets her in. In Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden rendered ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in contemporary English, ‘not daring … to adventure on her prologue, because ’tis too licentious’. Voltaire took the opposite approach: when he reworked Dryden’s version in the 1760s, he made it even ...”

“... evicted, his loss would be pecuniary and could therefore be determined. In some countries’ libel laws, and in the British law of slander (which is defamation by the spoken word – libel is published or broadcast), the plaintiff has to prove ‘special damage’ that is, a specific loss in money terms – before he or she can be awarded money damages. There ...”

“... survive. The deluge is a web of paradoxes and contradictions: it is a revolution, a product of the laws of nature that is characterised by lawlessness, licence and absence of limits. Although Seneca emphasises that it could come quickly, he lingers on its effects: human beings are left to huddle on mountaintops, starving to death, as their dwellings are swept ...”

“... or Panama, Burma or Irian Jaya, there is no trace of Orientalist condescension.Lewis’s friend John Hatt, who selected and introduces these articles, hasn’t set them in chronological order. But they carry their publication dates, starting in the early 1950s. And the dates show a progression, from presenting ‘un-English’ behaviour as essentially ...”

“... like the dreadful Vodi, despoilers of life, who work for Nelly, the witch with pointed teeth, in John Braine’s best novel, The Vodi, which appeared in 1959. Such demonic fantasies are quite common, I think, when young men are locked in a long-running conversation in, say, barrack-rooms or hospital wards. In Pinter’s case, the fantasy of ‘the ...”

“... Hannah, their liaison would probably not have taken place before the repeal of the racial purity laws; Sonny’s respect for party discipline would have seen to that. The story of a political campaigner whose life is torn apart by a relationship with a white woman has some apparent topicality in contemporary South Africa. The writing of My Son’s Story must ...”

“... not the work of one who believes that the critic ought to turn personal impressions into general laws’ and, true enough, a year earlier – in Portraits – he had rapturously hymned Oxford’s Walter Raleigh as ‘the most spirited of professorial critics’. Even so, it was evident that for Leavis the real crime of this powerful weekly ‘critic’ was ...”