“... Country House. The first edition was published by the Clarendon Press in 1971 and it remains, it may well be argued, the author’s finest achievement. In a field in which Georgian ‘taste’ and ‘proportion’ were still uncritically revered, the book was one of the first which did not treat Victorian country houses as monstrosities or as ...”

“... up their sentimental toying with the past, but the author is unmistakably bent on exacting it. It may be said that magnanimity can come easily to a victor. The society-building in Scott’s early fiction nevertheless seems more flexible and statesmanlike than the social visions of other creative English conservatives in the same years. Wordsworth in The ...”

“... A proof of his common humanity, it might be thought. In the general execration of Blunt there may even be some stifled incredulity as to his Satanic personality, but he has also been at the receiving end of a certain dissatisfaction with the double standard in our national life. It is a peculiarity of the whole affair that Blunt is seen to be closely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... or special than any secondary discourse about it, so that a tertiary discourse about the secondary may be undertaken without inhibition. There is no trace of the irony of Tate’s title, and a good deal of Shandean buttonholing: ‘I found it impossible to avoid sounding smug ...’ Donoghue’s sense of art as perennially subjected to biological and ...”

“... Now they are falling to pieces. The Severn Bridge is rusting. ‘Spaghetti Junction’ may soon have to be closed altogether. I am enough of a motorist to have learnt that it is safer and quicker to travel off the motorways than on them, but one hard winter, it seems, has brought havoc even to the ordinary roads of the country. It all sounds like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in her own life. In such places we see glimpses of a prose Edith Sitwell whose unused talents we may well regret. But perhaps we are on the wrong track. Perhaps the attempt to reduce Edith Sitwell to her works is a mistake. Perhaps the sacred monsters, the creatures of myth and legend should be simply recognised as such. Both Yeats and Gide, in seeking to ...”

“... collective and the State. Oberman rejects all this as too easy a way out of a complex problem. It may well salve ‘forever the German religious conscience’, but it does violence to truth. Generalisations must wait till we know a lot more. Confessional distortions are out of fashion; some political and social ones less so. Oberman’s book is a massive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the silence of the night I admit to myself that I am not a particularly dull fellow. The reader may ask why, holding these views about my appearance, and the belief that no reproduction is likely to bring great joy to the viewer, I should have succumbed relatively often to the request to be ‘done’. The explanation here is simple. A willingness to be ...”