“... four that afternoon. Now, on a hot, sunny, blue day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will ...”

“... study became ‘serious’. For a long time poetry left Murray unmoved, though he does remember reading all of Milton in a single long weekend. Somewhere late in his schooling a door opened. He mentions in one place help he received from a skilful teacher of English. In another he describes something like a moment of revelation ‘one evening in the ...”

“... much exaggerated, isolated cases of boyish high spirits’ – at times it has been like reading the Leeds United programme notes explaining away the latest blighted fixture. No, says James, look at the Repton excavations, with their revelations of careful, organised plundering and, one might add, of violent death and probable post-battle killing of ...”

“... the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his scholarly ...”

“... fingers.’ She is, of course, fondling the details, as it she were a student of Nabokov: ‘in reading one should notice and fondle the details,’ he adjured his class at Cornell. As a writer, Nabokov is a fanatic for detail, his mimesis rivalling that of nature itself: ‘when a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of the leaf ...”

“... to be entitled to a powerful sexual overtone, even if not the customary one. The reviewers of Peter Gay’s book have been very receptive to the thought that we have got Victorian sexuality wrong: for it is a leading part of the author’s argument that the Victorians were not prevailingly ignorant, inhibited, prudish and hypocritical about sex. But the ...”

“... of Lit-Lite. The fawn jackets. The suit-bags. The shaved sentences. English fiction (the creative reading list), as he satirises it in King of the City, acquires an energy that it would not otherwise espouse. Here is the unreconstructed ‘engine of comedy’, Rex Martin (‘the famous farting novelist’) and his diminutive son, Felix. Here is ‘Jillian ...”

“... she handed him back to the Danish navy. Soon afterwards Hans Jonathan met another enslaved man, Peter Samuel, and together they decided to petition for their freedom. Their ship’s captain, Steen Andersen Bille, who was also a privy councillor, met Prince Frederik, the de facto ruler of Denmark, on their behalf and procured a letter from him that stated ...”

“... by two years.) In places he unnecessarily diminishes his own subject, reflecting in the manner of Peter Laslett that every society contains a degree of conflict, and that occasional expressions of it are a matter of routine. Well, of course, it all depends on what we mean by politics. If, like Hobsbawm, we regard as political only actions which are directed ...”

“... correct. Professor Maynard Smith recounts how when he was a boy, he was introduced to science by reading books written for the lay person by the best practising scientists of the day; and in an essay entitled ‘Understanding science’ he posits two imaginary readers: ‘One is an intelligent but ignorant 16-year-old: myself when young. The other is an ...”

“... the Church locked up in original Scripture, in the Veritas Hebraica and the Veritas Graeca. Nobody reading this excellent book needs to go on thinking that Rabelais was a Humanist, not because of his study of the litterae humaniores (the Humanities and the thought which they conveyed in philosophy, law, morals and medicine), but because he liked human ...”

“... over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so difficult, perhaps, for the poet who would be inventing ‘Cathay’. Orientalism was also a Late Victorian vogue, and as Martin points out, the ...”

“... government refused to deal, Herr Scheel accused them of ‘abetting murder’. In 1975, when Peter Lorenz was taken by the Baader Meinhof, Schmidt agreed to every demand. But in that same year, when the Baader gang took the German Ambassador in Stockholm, Schmidt would not deal. He called it the ‘ad hoc’ line. Ms Moorehead has done a highly efficient ...”

“... instanced by Professor Brewer, what rejoinder is possible for a young man who has been reading Marlowe’s plays and perhaps acting in one of them, but has no more than a dim memory of looking into Sartor Resartus when at school? In Surprised by Joy Lewis asserts of his boyhood’s most admired teacher, William Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great ...”

“... appear, fosters self-indulgence. Certainly this is a term that came to my mind more than once when reading the works under review. For the novelist, experimentation is both demanding and risky, in that his whole enterprise may go haywire and prove unsaleable. The short-story writer is enabled, whether by subsidisation or merely by the brevity of the form or by ...”