“... A quick glance in any supermarket would force some qualification. The money of the family may be raised by one or more individuals, but it is spent on behalf of the family as a whole. Such income as gets to the hands of the housewife has for long been regarded by her, even if not by the law, as a family resource. It was John Hajnal in the 1960s who ...”

“... it. France and the USSR followed suit. Britain held out for an executive solution until the end of May: but in April, by appointing Justice Robert Jackson of the Supreme Court chief US prosecutor, Truman made it plain that there would be a trial even if Britain took no part. Nazi Germany having ceased to exist, delegations from the US, the USSR, Britain and ...”

“... wary of the ways in which his own imagination, stimulated by the text but floating free of it, may begin not to infer but to interfere. In the course of his discussion of Vermeer’s picture Lady Reading a Letter at an Open Window, Nuttall expresses a powerful suspicion ‘that somewhere in that house a clock is ticking.’ Such an observation, he ...”

“... Generosity, Pertinacity, Bliss. That the appearance of a figure ever conveyed these qualities may now be open to doubt. What is true is that the emblems of today are totally divorced from such elevated concepts and have become downgraded into advertisements for one’s self, predominantly for one’s sexual self. After reading The Language of Clothes one ...”

“... hair, that the edges of her picture become, at times, slightly blurred. It’s true that one may occasionally feel that Dr Pyman is almost too empathetic, too closely attuned to her subject; that we are merely exchanging one kind of impressionism, or one set of symbols, for another, rather as was the case – to take a work of a very different kind ...”

“... the last week of the campaign. This generous profusion was certainly good for the press – it may even have helped the Independent to turn the corner financially – but it is unlikely to have had much effect on the election result. A study of the 1983 General Election showed that, according to the voters themselves, press advertising was the form of ...”

“... they had no scruples about turning their guns on their own side when ‘necessary’. Again, they may have begun with rough-and-ready courts-martial of informers and traitors, but fairly soon it was a matter of large-scale murder and intimidation to ensure that peasant communities gave them the supportive welcome that all the textbooks on guerrilla warfare ...”

“... Victorian novelist. His new companions in the Abbey – Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy – may sell more copies of individual novels, but they cannot match the expansiveness of Trollope’s appeal. Forty or more of his works are currently in print – some in as many as five different editions. But for a century, Trollopians have complained about the ...”

“... suggests, Lacan’s ‘discourse of the Other’ (or its extensions in post-colonial theory) may seem to come closest among modern formulations to the extraordinary sense of occupation, or being occupied by another’s discourse, that is such a chilling feature of Othello; but the play itself also gives us its own language for this tragic loading/lodging ...”

“... Rights, and the 40 per cent who wanted a more representative British judiciary (whatever that may mean). The poll was a graphic indication of the task facing the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, in restoring confidence in the administration of criminal justice. Popular doubts about the fitness of the judiciary to protect civil rights and liberties are ...”

“... observed it so completely that he returned from Britain to the certainty of a lifetime in jail. It may be, of course, that Slovo was ordered abroad by some secret Party directive: we just don’t know. Everything that followed depended on that derision to leave and yet it is mysterious. There is no doubt that Slovo lived a life of complete political commitment ...”

“... and bows and arrows. They show why man-made objects, even purely aesthetic objects like these, may only be fully understandable in the environment in which they were made. It would be absurd not to be grateful for the opportunity to see so much original work. But it is impossible not to regret the diminishment of its power. Gathered together in private ...”

“... literary history, often based on biography, is too credulous, and that writers and their advocates may have interests in lying. It can’t replace Lockhart or Johnson as a detailed biographical record (it’s a fraction of the length of either), but can and does target the ways in which they and their kind deceive. Rather like saints’ lives, to which they ...”

“... cause in Spain in 1936 she wrote to a friend: ‘I feel it is my duty not to do my duty.’ In May 1935 the bank Blake had been working for in Paris collapsed in circumstances which meant its top officials might go to jail. Blake fled to America with his mother and Stead. He had been overworked and unsatisfied by the world of banking; now, they ...”

“... given the recent rapid transformations in Poland and the rest of the Soviet imperium, and it may be that Western readers may question the relevance to them of books so outdistanced by political developments. (In 1989 I was aware of an ugly and sub-intellectual wash of resentment against Brecht: ‘with Communism on the ...”