“... his interpreter, the expedition succeeds in its aim without alienating the Chinese populace. A little too emblematic, perhaps; especially the name of the steamer. But an appendix to An Insular Possession directs one to Hall and Bernard’s Narrative of the Voyages and Services of ‘The Nemesis’ (1844), where one will find that Mo’s account is accurate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Stein speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the ...”

“... worst off, those in cramped tenements or industrial back-to-backs built in the 19th century, had little if any space, while the rural poor, who were unlikely to own what land they had, worked it primarily for food. Willes’s title seems counterintuitive but she makes short shrift of the distinction between a garden for leisure and an allotment for work. In ...”

“... early on. He’s a lover traduced, but is he right that Britain has become a self-harming, venal little nation since it spurned his affections? That’s how it looks, to be sure, and his evidence is depressingly thorough, yet he’s confident we brought this on ourselves and hopeful, for that reason, that we can come to our senses and reinvent the ...”

“... 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 such lending that undid Northern Rock. As the American sociologists Bruce Carruthers and Arthur Stinchcombe pointed out in the journal Theory and Society in 1999, market liquidity – plentiful borrowing and lending, or buying and selling – ‘is, among other things, an issue in the sociology of knowledge’. Believable market ...”

“... paper’, and he was devoted to York Cottage, Sandringham, which Nicolson derided as ‘a horrid little house’, worse than an unseemly villa in Surbiton. ‘For seventeen years,’ Nicolson disparagingly recorded in his diary while working on the King’s early married life, ‘he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.’ But taste and ...”

“... not cut much Parliamentary ice.’) There is an interesting memorandum here from 1955 by Sir Arthur Benson, the governor of Northern Rhodesia, which claims that most Africans would support Britain’s policy against the nationalists if Britain would only make their chiefs ‘divine’ again. Ian Smith took the same general line in 1965, just before the ...”

“... as Disraeli, but it has never struck me as incongruous for a writer to do so. Perhaps all this has little to do with my novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, except that the book happened to be my first published novel. There was some uncertainty as to whether or not the book would be published at all, and though I don’t suppose there would have been any ...”

“... wrote, not about life in the lower depths, but about her work in the movies, and if she wrote very little, she wrote very well, with an acute critical intelligence, and much showing-off. She was a culture vulture, an intellectual snob, an autodidact – good for her! Although her life spiralled downwards, like Lulu’s, no victim, she. She ...”

“... in Mein Leben as one of Wagner’s mistresses in his years of exile. But in Mein Leben there is little of the dark side. What we find instead is a very characteristic early 19th-century hero: a kind of Lucien de Rubempré, leaping from misfortune to extravagant fortune and then falling again, running at full pace up and down metaphorical mountains (as well ...”

“... is the history of the Templars, whose legendary Grand Masters were to Languedoc and Provence what Arthur is to Wessex. One aspect of Durrell’s ambiguous Grail consists – as befits a banned author of the Thirties and a former associate of Henry Miller – of ‘love-lore’ or the secrets of sex. These, which have something to do with ‘dual control’ in ...”