“... we slip into the equally moralistic language of conspiracy. At the very least, this shorthand may conflate outcomes and intentions, professions and practice. More seriously, it readily conjures up a highly distorted picture of the agencies of political power, suggesting a monolithic plenitude of power: in reality, what counts for most in an intricate and ...”

“... US Government, the countervailing – and heroic – contestations of workers and peasants. Some may consider the approach theoretically crude (Hart’s classes sometimes behave in pretty mechanistic fashion, and his individual actors carry class labels tacked on to their names, reminding us of their ineluctable destinies), but at least we know where we ...”

“... context for, but do not in any way extend, the preoccupations of the major books. Their importance may rather be that they make it hard to distinguish between the two Empsons, the white-coated technocrat and the plain man costumed in tweedy prejudices. They suggest that, far from shelving his prejudices when he turned to literature, Empson used those ...”

“... too strong a whiff of the midnight oil about the phrases (and even the jokes) that he employed. He may not have had the authority or gravitas of his immediate predecessor, Jo Grimond, but he seldom failed to entertain his audience. Even within his own Party he was often thought to be a lightweight; but that never struck me as wholly fair. He had a consistent ...”

“... from any other novels that I have read.’ The Map of Love suggests that Soueif herself may have Tolstoyan aspirations. Aspirations, not pretensions: there is an engaging modesty about her voice. Still, both her earlier novel, In the Eye of the Sun (nearly eight hundred pages), and The Map of Love (more than five hundred) are more than romantic love ...”

“... relations, relations that are both local and wide-ranging, from the personal link a seduction poem may both draw upon and forge with the person being seduced to the more distant connection a text makes when a reader, contemplating the work long decades after it was written, is himself or herself moved to write about it. I am most interested in how and why ...”

“... borne out by the historical evidence I am quite unable to say, and I suspect that many historians may share my difficulty, as the questions have not been raised in this way before. Jack Goody’s book also raises interesting questions as to the value of considering traditional historical data in anthropological terms. What seems to be demonstrated clearly ...”

“... to report, it is perfectly obvious that no one has a duty to disclose – it is merely that they may be forced to. The claim of a right to know is often bogus, but it is not always so. It does apply if the information you want to know is information about yourself held by some public body. It also applies to a lot of information relevant to public ...”

“... interior decoration, but his reach as social historian does not seem to extend much further. We may generalise. The reason Edwardian Liberal thinkers were not more effective (and I’m not saying that they were entirely ineffective) was not ignorance or lack of good will but the result of a defect in the organ of vision. They were, owing to some ...”

“... Even if you enjoy Southern California as much as Reyner Banham you may still, like him, draw the line at those discreetly fenced-in and fortified cities in which the better-off sometimes choose to live, and at whose gates the visitor must check with the guardians before being allowed to enter. I recently spent a few days in one of these suburban paradises ...”

“... were opposed to the war. Little did Mosley know how justified his case was. For instance, on 28 May 1940 the War Cabinet discussed the question whether the British should appeal to Mussolini as an intermediary with Hitler. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was keen on this or as keen as he could be on anything. Neville Chamberlain, until recently Prime ...”

“... Classical education: he had boiled the axe instead of washing it with cold water. Boiling – you may need to know this – merely encrusts the blood in the pores of the metal: washing with cold water sluices away the evidence. A Classical education hardly seems a fair scapegoat: even on the science side of our most progressive schools they rarely teach the ...”

“... there are smooth narrative links between each slab of talk. Reading it is like eavesdropping: you may not enjoy it, but it’s hard to stop. Rumour has it that Edie has been snubbed by British publishers as ‘too American’. Well, it’s certainly that, but I would have thought its voyeur enticements were truly international:   So they said, ‘Just ...”

“... Our mutual affection has remained un-dimmed since the time when we first met at Oxford and long may it so continue. I was much moved and deeply grateful that such a thing could have happened to me. I am not so grateful that Thursday, 25 March, was my 76th birthday. I used not to notice Time’s Winged Chariot drawing near. Now I notice it at every turn. I ...”

“... will always be possible to saturate an ABM system with an avalanche of missiles.’ But saturation may not be possible with a minimal deterrent. In other words, the prospects look gloomy, for, as Zuckerman suggests in his analysis of the driving forces behind the arms race, it will be extremely difficult to halt the development of potentially destabilising ...”