“... In addition to the usual scholarly disputes – the Rai fell out with his friend Bernard Gilliat-Smith over the aspirated c in Balkan Romani – there was rivalry over gaining the Gypsies’ confidence and in the open-air excitement of the chase. The tent-dwellers appeared without warning at old camping-grounds and new, and disappeared like the shadows of ...”

“... poem had come a long way from ‘Casabianca’. As a historian, Carr is ecumenical: William Brooke Smith, a student who died of tuberculosis in 1908, is given as much consideration as Pound’s other early friend William Carlos Williams; Marianne Moore, who matriculated at Bryn Mawr in the same year as H.D., is barely mentioned. Snippets of truly mediocre ...”

“... Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief reference to Locke must be included. Barker-Benfield is a historian, and comes at his subject with the interests of a historian rather than of a literary scholar or a ...”

“... to attempt the virtually impossible task of getting to the right of New Labour was anyway futile. Margaret Thatcher said, not in her ‘Mummy returns’ speech at Plymouth during the election campaign but shortly before her fall in 1990: ‘Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!’ That showed not only ...”

“... her 1991 American edition for the 1992 British edition. This version, with a Preface by Joan Smith, includes information regarding the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Marilyn French deals with Southern and Eastern countries, including the ‘Third World’ – a term which she thinks passé and dishonest. Both books are contemporary and ...”

“... their bit and an array of cultural critics and journalists – Suzanne Moore, Linda Grant, Joan Smith, Beatrix Campbell, Susie Orbach, even Julie Burchill – have established a niche in newspaper and broadcast journalism. Others, like Lynne Segal and Lisa Jardine, have climbed the academic ladder. Even so, the shortage of media stars, as opposed to ...”

“... of the Cabinet had in turn told him that they had ‘tried unsuccessfully to get a leg over’ Margaret Thatcher. He not only recites the well-known story of Harold Macmillan’s cuckolding by Robert Boothby but indulges himself in fascinated gossip about who then got Sara Macmillan (or Boothby) pregnant, driving her to alcoholism and an early ...”

“... These are the bones of the prayer attributed (not very plausibly) to St Francis of Assisi that Margaret Thatcher quoted on the steps of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister, 4 May 1979: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony.’ Thatcher had just called on the queen and no doubt wrote the words as an aide-memoire on the short drive ...”

“... nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical ...”

“... even small children were laced. In Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain, has a precociously manipulated figure, her little torso moulded into a triangle above the ballooning shape of her tiered skirt. Promoters of female dress reform (‘healthful underdressing’) in the 19th century ...”

“... for many years frustrated by his wife, who behaved after their separation with the magnanimity of Margaret Cook. (His 1873 novel Kenelm Chillingly contains numerous jibes at the institution of marriage.) His peerage was finally gazetted in 1866. He experimented with different genres, not (as his enemies said) as an eager caterer to the restless appetite of ...”

“... cartel in the book trade is really like he should contemplate the hegemony of Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s lending libraries in the late 19th century.) The price of new books has never been as high: in their standard three-volume form, novels cost a guinea and a half – a week’s wage. Writers were stifled by the puritanical prejudices of the ...”

“... late 20th century, which would be news to, say, Charity Cannon Willard, whose 1936 MA thesis at Smith College was the start of a lifetime dedicated to de Pizan’s thought. And in her choice of Astell and Wollstonecraft, Penaluna opts for two women philosophers who have been the subjects of much important scholarship; her chapter on Astell, for ...”

“... and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United Investments, Price Waterhouse sued KPMG. Over Polly Peck, Touche Ross sued Coopers and Lybrand. Poor Coopers and Lybrand was in the soup more than once over its not altogether distinguished accountancy of ...”

“... on his choice). Finding the politics of that book layered on too thickly, the American poet Dave Smith described the effect in terms strangely reminiscent of life on board the Suvorov: ‘a show of skills which has, too often, the feel of trial military manoeuvres with no apparent enemy’. But in many ways The Donkey’s Ears is unusual for the political ...”