“... Bates nestles side by side with Jonathan Swift, and Ted Hughes with Chaucer. A generation ago, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia would probably have been selected; nowadays hardly anybody reads Lambs essays, although teachers nervous of starting on Shakespeare with 14-year-olds are urged to ease them in with the dreary Tales from Shakespeare. If one had to ...”

“... to escape the total domination of the first of these two categories. And the present review, I hope, does not fall squarely within the second. When Troilus, in Shakespeare’s play, finds that Cressida, whom he has identified with fidelity, is actually unfaithful, he exclaims: ‘This is and isn’t Cressid.’ He also says:             O ...”

“... with inscrutable road signs’. What she seems to have in mind is something drawn by Charles Addams, homes for ghouls rather than the headquarters of what is commonly assumed to be a form of therapy. Once an analyst has completed his training he begins to hope that he will, in time, become a training analyst ...”

“... a pair of models, but they ‘looked sleazy’. The artist engaged to produce the paintings, Charles Raymond, took one look and said: ‘I’ll do it with my wife.’ He recalled that during the shoot, ‘We got carried away, and [the photographer] disappeared.’ This was how the images ended up depicting a quite ordinary-looking, slightly alternative ...”

“... rather obscured by glossing political action merely as the gauging of efficient means to ends. As Charles Taylor (the Canadian politician and philosopher, not the Liberian gunslinger) has pointed out, dousing the Vietnamese population in Agent Orange is only prima facie comprehensible as the upshot of a cost/benefit util-tot. It is better seen ...”

“... animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed fragments. Nobody seems to be listening. Last year set records: even without counting the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of ...”

“... foraged for greens, communed with trees, danced in the sea and made wands. Prince Charles, visiting in 1995, enthused about Sark’s uniqueness and urged the locals not to change.What Sark has never offered is luxury. Victorian writers attributed the longevity of the residents to daily exercise, strong breezes and seaweed, as well as hard work ...”

“... Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, ...”

“... just the same but blue. I have a yellow knitted jacket, double-breasted, that I call a Prince Charles coat. Summer comes and I have a crisp white dress with blackberries on, which shows my dimpled knees. I have a pink and blue frock my mother doesn’t like so much, chosen by me because it’s longer; people of six, I think, have longer skirts, and I am ...”

“... he considered the greatest. When he visited Shanghai in 1933, one local newspaper expressed the hope that Japanese military activity in Manchuria would be suspended because of his visit. If his influence gradually waned, it is partly because he was so typical of his age that when it passed away, his reputation diminished along with it. His political ...”

“... Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant reflecting telescope, on a mission to map the southern skies ...”

“... tradition. ‘As long as you think you’re white,’ James Baldwin once said, ‘there’s no hope for you.’Attempts to dismantle racism have often subverted its vocabulary, turning epithets into appellations of pride. But anti-racist intellectuals have also been alert to the risk of nativism, of falling deeper into the clutches of race. In a debate ...”

“... out by considering the strange behaviour at rugby internationals (the introduction of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’? All the Protestant Ulstermen standing to attention for ‘The Soldier’s Song’?); or the nature of money (English notes and coins, Scottish ditto, but just try passing British Linen notes south of the Tees, Welsh coins only, Northern Irish ...”

“... them not are in the same religious condition as those who have, – this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of No-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No. Yet in the same piece he earnestly ...”

“... choices filled their minds and nothing else: These are the speeches I can listen to. And The hope and love I had in fields and moors, In hills, in waters lashing round the coast. The coast of where? And where but you, O England, Which name has gathered all my hopes and loves, Changed like a dream, the land that never was And yet to which I gave my ...”