“... was perhaps two per annum for each inhabitant, but about 42 in the first half of the 1880s.’ It may have been on this occasion that he observed that British cities tended to have two major football teams, not only one, and that this meant something. Some cities don’t, I reflected, while beginning to grasp the appeal of sociology, then in its heyday. It ...”

“... to rearrange memories, impose some sort of order or pattern. In the same way that a novelist may write about his own life, disguising it as a tale about imaginary people, autobiography may be a sly form of fiction. And it follows that the success of an autobiography depends on whether or not he makes a good story of ...”

“... which not only evoke the type of frame that might originally have surrounded the painting, but may even be considered as an abstract or epitome of Bassano’s tightly interlaced composition, with the browns, yellows and whites of the painting matched by the partly gilded and silvered walnut.In another room, however, daylight has been cut out to protect ...”

“... another. The London Review will therefore have to be very much aware of the New York Review. We may on occasion publish some of the same writers and review some of the same books, and we shan’t always be straining to make our coverage different or complementary. But it will not be hard to tell which journal is which. The obvious difference will relate to ...”

“... blame Lord Bragg for his confusion: when Smith took over the post from Virginia Bottomley in May 1997, he was officially in charge of National Heritage, a department which had subsumed the Arts after the 1992 election. In the old days – who can forget Colin Moynihan? – Sport was a sub-directory of Education, and Media was nowhere. And just to ...”

“... turns to women and to love – to those desertions or ‘absences without leave’ which passion may bring about, and to desertion simply. The men exchange memories of troubles more or less humorous, among them a massive court-martialling once provoked by a trick played by one Boy Niven, who led a large group of seamen and marines on a wild-goose-chase in ...”

“... watch the Götterdämmerung of ineptocracy that is Brexit, they are baffled but entertained. There may be some well-deserved Schadenfreude as they watch what happens to a country that becomes addicted to fetishising its own nationhood and imbibes too many of the clichés it once produced for export: commonsensical, mild, tolerant people led by ...”

“... interests, to parochialism and, when big issues or money are involved, to hijacking. That may not make it any worse than what we now have, but it won’t make it a whole lot better. Bogdanor’s description of the political philosophy of individualism as ‘cutting power into pieces’ may be well chosen; but to ...”

“... his son-in-law, was the fourteenth signatory; Ludlow was the fortieth.After the Restoration in May 1660, the signatories found themselves hunted regicides. Ludlow left London for Dieppe in August and spent more than three decades in exile, in Geneva, Lausanne, Vevey and Bern. Revolutionary change in 1689 prompted him to risk returning to England, but this ...”

“... believers in the cult of personality, who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the ...”

“... says that lunulae are appropriate for any ‘unnecessary parcell of speach which nevertheless may be thence without any detriment to the rest’; and the notion is still current. But Leander for one would take exception to missing out ‘(come thither)’.Delectable – though I may as well take my small revenge ...”

“... multiplicity of first-person narratives. And the ‘I’ of The Newcomes, for instance, though he may deceive you into thinking him fixed, is a very tricky device, at once a dramatis persona and Chorus and ‘the novelist’, who finally recedes and is seen receding by a different narrator. These pertinent but awkward instances are ignored by Mr ...”

“... ritual, and specifically of magic and its relation with religion. Indeed, these social sciences may be said to have emerged from that study. The classics of modern social science, whether Durkheim, Mauss, Evans-Pritchard or Weber, have all been obsessed by these issues, which they connect more or less closely with the very origins of our own society. Here ...”

“... it, is, in Tuan’s view, not only inherent in affection, it can be exercised upon anything that may be said to live. It is at this point that the peculiarity of the book begins to emerge, for Tuan ascribes life not only to animals and plants but also to water. Moreover he makes no distinctions between sentient and other natural beings. Anything in the ...”

“... be tedious to do so, and of little interest to most users of the book.’ Most users of the book may well agree: but it is nonetheless interesting to trace the history of a standard work, to see how authority takes or shifts its stance. Editorial revisions and additions, perhaps not in themselves extensive, may appreciably ...”