“... whether it wasn’t a little hard that ‘one deviation from chastity should so absolutely ruin a young woman.’ Not at all, said Johnson. ‘It is the great principle she is taught. When she has given up that principle she has given up every notion of female honour and virtue.’ Like Eve before her, she has by one wicked act disordered the entire fabric of ...”

“... Guardian. The discovery that in war both sides do unpleasant things came as a deep shock to the young Liberal. This could not be the fault of the Turks, who were defending ‘their own country’ against ‘foreign invaders’. ‘Obviously,’ says Professor McNeill, ‘a breakdown of older Ottoman patterns of life and manners under the impact of ideas and ...”

“... Soon after they have ensnared their young victims, the Moonies brainwash them, I am told, into hating their parents and families. Other Californian cults may do the same. The British Conservative Party is a long way from California, and it is still some way from being a cult: yet in recent years odd things have been happening to the Conservative Party ...”

“... intends to be at the state end of the gun.’ For all the fervour with which Shaw was read by young socialists in the early years of this century, his political stances now seem absurd garments, acquired, like the celebrated all-in-one Jaeger suit, as a way of playing to the gallery, shocking but half-delighting the bourgeoisie on whom his fortunes as a ...”

“... virginal blood and of defloration in primitive societies’. The chief proponent of this view was Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), who, in his monumental History of Marriage, begun in 1891, furnished partial evidence for his theory from Herodotus, and from Brazil, the Caribbean, Senegal, Libya, Morocco, Kurdistan, Cambodia and Malabar, while steadfastly ...”

“... history has become exciting again. The long stand-off between Namierite history from above and Edward Thompson-style history from below is over, and a broader and more colourful view of the period has emerged. Much of the new historiography comes from the US and Canada, where its preoccupations – with empire and subject peoples, with law and ...”

“... aimed at discrediting Kinsey; she is also the author of Kinsey, Sex and Fraud (co-written with Edward Eichel, a Manhattan psychotherapist) and Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences. In these books she equates Kinsey with Josef Mengele, accusing him of skewing his statistics to legitimise all sorts of perversions, of kidnapping and drugging ...”

“... humorous kindness. He never traded on his fame, was generous with royalties and encouraged young Welsh poets. He was also a good comforter of the sick, dying and desperate. As both son and grandson suggest, Elsi played her part in these silences. She seems to have been more sociable, well-travelled and practical than her husband, but she never ...”

“... of Saki is published explicitly for children – Saki’s stories could certainly be read by young people, but only by the kind who relish the earlier versions of fairy tales, those in which Red Riding Hood is eaten, and Cinderella’s stepmother decapitated with the lid of a trunk – and proposes a candidate for Saki’s heir by way of its ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ called the approach to Oxford by train ‘the most contemptible in Europe’. There’s no view to speak of, and the station is a big shed with lots of glass and cheap detailing: blue pillars and PVC fascias. The city’s relationship to the railway, like its relationship to the world, is arrogant but insecure, high-minded but petty ...”

“... his research on cirripedes and his zoological discussions with his correspondents. One of these, Edward Cresy, was in Paris around April 1848, and Darwin wrote begging him to ‘consult a work for me on sheep, (which would not take you more than half an hour) which I can not otherwise see.’ Not a word about French politics. Yet all work and no play, even ...”

“... to look like Monaco, or Portofino. Former President Gerald Ford – whose son acts in the soap The Young and the Restless – has once appeared as himself. So, too, has Henry Kissinger. At a charity ball in Denver, Joan Collins wafts up to Kissinger with the greeting: ‘Henry, I haven’t seen you since Portofino.’ In the most far-reaching words of his ...”

“... but themselves. The relationship is the same in kind, though not in degree, as that between the young Israeli fighter and the parents who went, unresisting, into the concentration camps. The Six-Day War of 1967 represented a watershed: after it, reliance on Pan-Arabism was replaced by a flowering of Palestinian nationalism. Dimbleby supplies the necessary ...”

“... lines of the 1970 one which led to the formation of the Provisionals. No one knows better than the young Northern Sinn Fein leadership that the Party is nothing without the IRA. New tactics and methods were also hammered out. The IRA, which has about five hundred members, more than half of them in the North of Ireland, was purged as much as possible of ...”

“... is that they contain two meanings. For instance, in Spring (1563), the head and shoulders of a young man is represented by many spring flowers. The particular meanings of man and flowers are not as meaningful as that there are two, instead of the usual one. Further, what is exciting is not the two meanings but the relationship between them, the gap and the ...”