“... and which has institutionalised personal power in a way reminiscent of De Gaulle or Peron: St John Stevas’s phrase about Mrs. Thatcher – ‘a new Cromwell of the Right’ – says it well. And yet the question we find ourselves asking is not: how can the Opposition win? but: how can the Government possibly lose? When one is in the desert one cannot ...”

“... wilderness renamed is still a wilderness,’ writes Lawson-Peebles in apparent agreement with John Quincy Adams and Joseph Hall, both of whom had scorned the ‘edenic’ fables told about the West. But is it? Yes, in the sense that you can still starve or freeze or get eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience ...”

“... redemption, and include the news that Effie Bawn was the nicest person to live in Glasgow since St John Ogilvie. But before that day, as a reformed woman, Netta would rinse her clothes in Barlinnie Prison, for other niceness, and other reform. She incited a crowd to riot, and was said to be behind the suffragette burning of Leuchars Station. Netta held young ...”

“... searching for the kindness of strangers on Clapham Common. The Director-General of the BBC, Sir John Birt, was knighted by Tony Blair and worked with and befriended Mandelson at London Weekend Television in the early Eighties. LWT executives became millionaires when a share option lottery in 1993 fell well for them. (Among the lucky LWT ...”

“... oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more recently, David Shayler (John Hampden Grammar, High Wycombe). The latest, Richard Tomlinson, doesn’t quite fit – he got a scholarship from a state primary school to a ‘prestigious public school’. The motives for whistleblowing can be various: high principle, personal ...”

“... difficult relationships between the privatised companies will add considerably to the problems. John Uff, the chairman of the Southall Inquiry, says that the privatised rail industry is unable to deal effectively with inter-company issues, and that research and development projects open lines of conflict between the commercial interests of different parties ...”

“... the cause had been a chorister two years younger than Byron who had been his lover at Cambridge. John Edleston (commemorated in his poetry as ‘Thyrza’) moved to London when his voice broke to take up a position as a clerk in a mercantile firm. They hadn’t seen each other for a while, when Edleston wrote to Byron, asking for help with finding a new ...”

“... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...”

“... realism’, it seems a plausible clue to the relationship of Kafka to Flaubert, or of Kurosawa to John Ford, but will be found a clueless guide to Proust and his relationship to a single precursor. We are advised by Anderson to think hard about Jameson’s suggestion that we may ‘grow new organs to expand our sensoria and our bodies to some new, as yet ...”

“... Yet hybridity of this kind is neither new nor surprising. In Modern Asian Art (1998), John Clark places it in perspective with a series of diachronic case-studies of artistic Modernism, ranging through prewar Japan and India, Revolutionary China and South-East Asia in the Eighties and Nineties. Clark warns against the ‘acceptance of a type of ...”

“... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...”

“... number of contributors to the Stachura collection have valuable points to make along these lines. John Conway offers a sensitive account of the German Churches after 1918, showing how they were unwilling and unprepared to meet the challenge posed by the republic, and came to see Hitler as a bulwark against Communism and as a national saviour. Dick Geary ...”

“... aural shortcomings here are not an isolated instance in his work and bother even his admirers. For John Lucas, who admires Porter’s savage attacks on metropolitan manners, verbal clumsiness is simply the price to be paid for Porter’s fecundity and invention – the cost of weariness after years at the typewriter bashing the smoothies. For others perhaps ...”

“... not dictated by the needs and resources of a local economy. Some thirteen years ago I watched Sir John Habakkuk at a conference sketch out on the board how a drop in the average age of marriage in 1740 of two years, maintained throughout the rest of the century, would explain the whole expansion of 18th-century population in England: but everyone agreed that ...”

“... epilepsy or Sartrean ‘false death’, according to your terminology and interpretation; John Bayley has wittily suggested a new one – namely, a good piece of acting), then genius. How to explain what Sartre calls ‘this scandalous occurrence: an idiot who becomes a genius?’ And how, a fortiori, to explain it when the documentary evidence is ...”