“... and Mind but discovered that it was out. Lewes’s wife had been his father’s mistress, which may have had something to do with the tragedy that followed. The young man went to the Magazine Room, where he shot himself in the head with a Derringer pistol, then reloaded and did it again. This led to a quarter of an hour’s hiatus in library services while ...”

“... it is not surprising that its most contentious subjects are English and history. It may be said that there is nothing new in the existence of a national ideology to which most English schools subscribe – only that in the past this was largely hidden. In American schools prayers are forbidden, but all pupils have to repeat loyalty oaths and ...”

“... control by means of a series of genuflections, nurtured a new and large group of technocrats who may not have challenged the Party but were no longer paralysed by fear of it. This was ‘a social group ... of great intellectual and practical strength, potentially capable of serving as the spiritual centre of an anti-nomenklatura opposition. It was ...”

“... both British Rail and the hotel industry. Those with established reputations, such as Dr Hutton, may be successful in obtaining support for this task, but how many books are simply not being written because their potential authors cannot afford the costs entailed? Logically, if not formally, this book divides into two parts, one dealing with the fall of ...”

“... in the way asserted. Thus Kay Carmichael’s correlation between poverty and mental ill health may mean, as she thinks, that poverty drives people to mental breakdown, but also may mean that people fail to hold down well-paid jobs when their mental health is disturbed. There are instances of the half-statistic: John ...”

“... to control his wife, and that the Politburo was entirely powerless in this matter. Similarly, one may feel some sympathy with him in the last years of his life as he felt his power slip away amid growing signs of the ‘bourgeoisification’ of the new China, but it is difficult to understand why he allowed Jiang Quing to order a large public park in Beijing ...”

“... that none was as important as was once thought seems a curiously myopic way to proceed. Railways may not have been ‘indispensable’: but they were still, apparently, more important than any other single ‘factor’ mentioned in this book. The heroic events may not have been typical: but, as the cover eloquently ...”

“... though their effect was at the time, are hilarious to read today. If read by Mrs Thatcher, they may tempt her to try her hand at reincarnation: this officer ‘has proved himself disloyal, his services should be dispensed with ... is old and decrepit and should go at once ... should be sent away to end his life in peace ... is quite unfit to be a ...”

“... wasn’t some kind of neurotic who could be expected to crack up in difficult circumstances? She may have been rich but she wasn’t laid back. Her mother was strict, a ‘Southern lady of the old school’, and the girls (five of them) didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs or ‘go out anywhere’ in jeans. Her father taught her how to use a gun. She trusted ...”

“... of that enterprise need not invalidate the work: like a climber or a contemplative, the maker may come to think that the only way of fully understanding what he is doing is to have done it. Irwin says of his work in the early Sixties: ‘With those late line paintings the process was intimate with the solution. I sometimes wonder whether anyone in the ...”

“... is a way of abdicating from the inexpressible mode of being that it also sustains. The clarity may be illusory, but the Romantic dawn and the Age of Reason unite to give it a great and naive confidence, so that the reader feels it is trembling on the verge of some great revelation, some breakthrough about the state of the universe and man’s nature. As ...”

“... two volumes, it had more in common with the style of the 18th century than the 20th century. We may in retrospect regard 1868 as the beginning of the period of adversary politics and the ‘swing of the pendulum’: a Conservative win in 1874, Liberals in 1880, a slight hiccup in 1885, but Conservatives back in 1886, Liberals in 1892, Conservatives in ...”

“... passive and affectionate, inspired by curiosity, wonder and love – rarely by hate. She may be likened, at least in this respect, to the Whitman who chronicles the incubating self nurtured by the sensuous world: There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object ...”

“... sleep from which, it seems, we are only now beginning to wake up. The suspicion that Britain may not, after all, be unalterably the nicest of all possible modern states to live in grows as each day of Mrs Thatcher’s second term passes. There are signs, moreover, that we are beginning to lose our collective nerve, as witness the howls of remorse and ...”

“... enough, for she held little back. ‘I talk to you as you bid me, without reserve, for I think I may. I love you. I wish to have you for a friend. I wish to be yours.’ She fell in love with abandon and innundated him with letters that included pillow talk, often in French, as if to separate this relationship from her routine married life. There were no ...”