“... with an Order of 1940 was last used in February of 1951, by the Attlee Government. All this may be familiar and even obvious. But it is not seen as quite so obvious by David Marquand, whose newly-published The Unprincipled Society* tells the history of 20th-century Britain in terms of the rise and fall of a ‘Keynesian’ consensus in which, for a few ...”

“... left-wing opinion. Bagshaw’s situation is in some degree that of all intellectuals. Enthusiasm may die, but sheer professional interest mercifully remains. I thought of Bagshaw when reading Frank Kermode’s lively little book History and Value, and I thought of him again while enjoying Richard Cobb’s Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have ...”

“... Not even the most intransigent of the Old Guard can see any danger in Felipe Gonzalez. Spain may be a less interesting place now but it is much more prosperous. The most obvious physical change in recent years has been caused by the emergence of the foreign car as a status symbol: the streets of Madrid are clogged by rival fleets of BMW and Mercedes ...”

“... the Dowager Empress Tz’u-hsi (enamoured of silkworms, one of Sebald’s preoccupations). It may have been – Sebald imagines – that the Dowager Empress cancelled the order for the miniature court train intended for Kuang-hsu when the latter was bold enough to oppose her views. (Historically, this falling out happened in the late 1890s.) And thence to ...”

“... figure in the official world of art and culture in the broadest sense between the wars’, which may say more about the times than about the man. There can be no denying Crawford’s efforts on behalf of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the BBC, Manchester University, and other institutions. Yet as a fighter ‘for the greatness of the English ...”

“... often as a way of putting Americans in their place) that we lack a proper historical sense. It may be true. The New Zealand poet Charles Brasch wrote poems looking forward to a time when we, too, would have a landscape littered with ruins. ‘The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning,’ he wailed. I think he ...”

“... World 3. This is also acceptable, provided we are careful. The concept of falsification (World 3) may influence the way I think about an experiment (World 2), and this in turn may influence which instruments are connected in what ways (World 1). But in that last sentence, the ‘concept of falsification’ which influences ...”

“... was craggy, formidable, his conversation a further outlet for his aggressiveness. While he may not have talked for victory, it is said that his verbal tirades were a faithful copy of the way he wrote. Ruskin had all the social graces, as well as a fine-honed aesthetic sense which Carlyle totally lacked. ‘Airt, airt, what is it all about?’ he once ...”

“... little poorly-paid work remains. Pressure builds up, and though no one as yet admits an explosion may come, Labour politicians are not slow to issue grave warnings about social consequences. Could it happen? A one-party dictatorship? Urban guerrillas? The possessed and the dispossessed fighting it out in a banana monarchy? Marcia confines herself, in this ...”

“... theories about Australia. Some say that it is a form of cell-block Cockney, that the Kray brothers may even now be stammering their parole appeals in infant Oz. Others contend that it must be to do with the weather: that early Australians who settled some thousand miles from each other, with no contact, and from quite different racial stocks, all began ...”

“... is always found to be (weak copulative) about (weaker preposition) something. Half-baked analysis may cry out for ‘Themes’, but creators who know different shouldn’t go along with this reduction. Shame is a shorter and rather more linear narrative than Midnight’s Children. The earlier novel confronted the history of the subcontinent, but its ...”

“... of The Twenties and The Thirties – Wilson’s notebooks and diaries for those decades – may have done something to further this end. Wilson had done some of the preparation for their publication before his death in 1972. The Forties is wholly edited by Leon Edel, who says in his Preface that this decade, at any rate the first half of it, is pretty ...”

“... Antiphon did not expect his audience seriously to believe what he was saying. But that audience may well have included Athenian citizens who were convinced that the city was endangered because the Eleusinian mysteries had been profaned by a drunken mob, and the herms (the ithyphallic pillars that guarded the entry to houses) had been mutilated. For some ...”

“... except his own? The Weight of the world carries the s’enfoutiste ‘dedication’: To whom it may concern’. And of course the public loved it – or anyway they bought it. Even the critics loved it. Apparently there were only two dissenting opinions, and one of them, I guess, will have been in the FAZ.The Weight of the World is a journal kept by Handke ...”

“... Nothing could be further from the detective novel than this form of thriller-writing, and one may wonder why Ruth Rendell has moved from the comfortable world of Kingsmarkham where Wexford always gets his man to the lonely, desperate, mist-shrouded world of the Dollys, the Bawnes, the Mopsas and the Benets. Perhaps there is something logical in the ...”