“... with tutorial concern for the young. There were dons who coached the boat, such as Leslie Stephen. There was a college such as King’s, for centuries an Etonian preserve, where the young fellows had known the undergraduates when they were both together in College at Eton and treated them therefore as equals; Bradshaw, a formidable scholar, was at ...”

“... behind an apparently impersonal language of moral disapproval and disdain. Thomas, who seemed small and effeminate, particularly beside his fierce brother William, was bound in early life to seek for love elsewhere: in a landscape, or in literature. It is, one might say, the old story. When the father died, his family became itinerant, shepherded by the ...”

“... of the technique of ‘close reading’, which is easily taught, and can be practised on a very small number of books. Williams has remarked that in his own criticism he found the method intoxicating but misleading, because it evaded structural problems and obscured questions of belief and ideology. Even more fundamental to the evolving discipline was its ...”

“... unmitigated by the humour and grudging respect that breaks out in Johnson on the Scots. Among the small would-be nations Byron also tried to help was Armenia, not mentioned in this book. After arriving in Venice in 1816, he provided money for an Armenian dictionary, and did some work on it himself. Is there a statue to him, or does some underground cell still ...”

“... Olympic games. Berlin in the Thirties, if you like. Two hundred million pounds of lottery money is small change when set against the conceptual brilliance, the dynamism, of this proposal. You can almost believe it. The site is buzzing, the great yellow struts on which the dome will be erected are lying on their sides. Piles are being power-driven deep into the ...”

“... making people throb with awakenedness.‘Instead of the philosophy being the clue to Lawrence,’ Stephen Potter wrote in 1930, ‘it will be Lawrence who is the clue to the philosophy.’ Almost a century later, Wilson takes a similar tack, although she is clearly not much taken with the philosophy in its own right: ‘For all his claims to prophetic ...”

“... of territories, but also “unity of being”, an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.’ That was then, and the anarchs of those days have passed on. Joyce’s ...”

“... liberties. If the jury is such a ‘palladium’ of English justice why is it reserved for such a small number of cases, most defendants being treated to the cheaper, less flamboyant ‘trivial’ justice of the magistrates’ court? If the jury is such a guardian of our liberties and of justice, are we implying that magistrates dispense some lesser form of ...”

“... Eliot declined he took the offer (as he said to his mother) as another sign that ‘there is a small and select public which regards me as the best living critic, as well as the best living poet, in England.’ In the letter to Murry he says he and Vivien ‘are looking forward to seeing Katherine’. Mansfield’s report of the dinner party that followed ...”

“... 1716 coincided almost exactly with the early stirrings of the landscape movement. A year earlier, Stephen Switzer, one of the first promoters of the picturesque style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and ...”

“... Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of Italian Fascism Douglas Stephen, architect of a ‘Dan Dare mini-skyscraper’ in Swindon, or the South London aesthete Sextus Dyball, designer of delirious suburban villas, you might think he’s making them up. He isn’t. The North, broadly conceived, is Meades’s fixation, bar ...”

“... we’re not campaigning any more: the election’s over.’ Before the putdown, McCain had looked small and confused – there was dead air all around him – but Obama by his response awarded him the pathos of a beaten man. An oddly unpleasant schoolmasterish moment. Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of ...”

“... compliance with their human rights. Human rights charters work best when the lawyers are only a small part of them. If the inquest cases brought under the act seem to have been effective this is not because they have functioned as ethical interventions by a far removed branch of government but because the concerns of the judges have found an echo across the ...”

“... for an American public assumed to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently found, ‘isolationism’ wasn’t a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism – including those at home who were still committed to the equal legal ...”

“... his interventions were concerned with the operation of a subsection that we had considered a very small part of a bigger picture. But a key part of the success of a judge lies in his or her skill at isolating the issue for decision: the larger it is, the broader the sweep of the case; the narrower, the fewer implications a ruling will have. Lord Hutton is by ...”