“... democrats who do not believe it is necessary to talk proper to be a social democrat; Gaitskell may well have been mellowing in his last months. Yet unless (as many Tories, indeed, believe) God is a Tory, one can only see the special cruelty of death as pointing up Labour’s chronic shortage of convincing leadership candidates. Arguably, the class and ...”

“... a single text, he manages to suggest immensely. The scheme of cultural history he often draws on may not be very impressive – it is a kind of Romantic primitivism he shares with Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett and Dickens, the wish of Barrie’s Peter Pan that our lives could be simple and protected, like children’s, and that society had never had to grow ...”

“... the work seriously. Syberberg eschews a naturalistic or documentary style of presentation. There may be more hard facts than soft focuses in the film, but the facts are woven into images from which they are inseparable. They would not be much help in passing an exam in history or civics. In a work as full of conceit as it is of conceits, Syberberg shows an ...”

“... The English are not at their best, although they may well be at their most characteristic, when they go on a lot about the dear old days at school or the ’varsity. Not even the inspired Cyril Connolly could get his tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it ...”

“... he occupies the post himself, also as a retirement benefit from a federal government. Whitlam may not see the irony. Hawke, one may be sure, does. Hawke not only tempted Whitlam to leave the country, but behaved in his first six months in exactly the opposite way from Whitlam. Whitlam did everything. Hawke did nothing ...”

“... had been arguing for decades. He did not think highly of their peculiar brand of rhetoric; and may for once have felt that he had acquired some strange bedfellows. Like them, he had come from ‘the Left’ – in his view, a mythical entity whose members believe it to embody all the virtues, however incompatible they might be with one another. Unlike ...”

“... not neglected, but more context and commentary are required if they are to be understood. Palumbo may have been inspired in his conduct by American museum trustees, who often, and not always unreasonably, behave as if they own the institution they represent. It was under Thatcher that the traditional role of the museum trustee in this country began to be ...”

“... and a perimeter fence. There are some, but not many restrictions placed on where the bereaved may bury their dead, although not everything has changed since the days of the old South Africa. Burial plots in ‘D’-grade cemeteries, such as those in Soweto, will cost black working-class families the equivalent of a week’s wages at 110 Rands or 18 ...”

“... area of research but has a powerful explanatory value – ‘I suddenly see how geography may explain the history of culture.’ This is a strong claim and how far it stands up to scrutiny, judged on Moretti’s own terms, is moot. Everything else, on virtually every page of this book, is fascinating. But what of its theoretical bedrock? The argument ...”

“... in France, lived alongside nine million natives. It was a potentially explosive situation. In May 1954, the French were beaten at Dien Bien Phu: they ‘lost’ Indochina, wiped out politically and diplomatically, much more than militarily, as they would eventually be in Algeria. The same year a small group of Algerian nationalists launched an unpromising ...”

“... Right was less reluctant to contemplate violence, and urged the military to intervene, though it may have been surprised by the ferocity of the coup. By 11 September 1973 Allende had run out of options. Pinochet, who had leapfrogged to the top of the list of senior generals the previous month (an early indication that he was Allende’s equal in political ...”

“... privatisation of Chile’s pension system as the ‘obligatory model’ for their own. In May, General Barry McCaffrey, chief of the US Army Southern Command (with which, contrary to legend, Pinochet’s relations were not warm), visited the ex-dictator in Santiago, and described him afterwards as ‘a man of historic vision and stature’. Pinochet ...”

“... dream, that those who think of reading Homer or Dante are more likely actually to read them. This may be because novels themselves involve quite a lot of day-dreaming, a lot of associative world-making, whereas poems, even long poems, usually get us to concentrate firmly on the language and the matter in hand. Proust himself was an expert on this subject, and ...”

“... monastic orders to satisfy her desires. But by allowing anger to vent itself in laughter satire may often be a substitute for, not a summons to, revolution. Rochester’s obscene ‘Satyr on Charles II’ was the work not of a puritan revolutionary but of a privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy ...”

“... what all those co-operative and dutiful civil servants did; even the morally self-confident may be unnerved by the fear that routinised large-scale murder is not very different from much else that goes on in total war. The bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, Nagasaki and Hiroshima does nothing to palliate the horrors of the camps, but it ...”