“... Cheshire, he notices, now has a fancy knot garden ‘exactly reproducing what the Tudor Moretons may possibly have had, or if they didn’t, ought to have had’.And the men and women who inhabit this land of dead but re-imagined great houses do not, Lees-Milne recognises, all see them in the same way. In the epilogue to the book, he mourns that – although ...”

“... Mountbattens. One must also be candid and say that one doesn’t blame him. His sense of fairness may well arise from his sense of being out of his depth, however, and it hit me on page 250, where Ziegler writes: ‘It was the seamen’s strike which threw the government off course.’ By then we are at 1966, with the full disgrace of the July deflationary ...”

“... mimicry soon becomes a pathological condition. It is a relief that two of the present five books may be pronounced orthopaedically sound. Opinions differ as to whether Deconstruction will take over the academy, or be ‘co-opted’ by it, so dwindling into a slicker version of the old New Criticism. Some think or hope that it will simply fade away. The ...”

“... of clinics and hospitals and medical schools. T.J. Binyon thinks the moonlighting professional may be the detective of the future – ‘We might hope to see, for example, more characters like Dr Alex Delaware’ – but Delaware seems really to be a neat updating of the past, an amiable new cousin for Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe. Binyon is impressed by ...”

“... Abersychan ethic is an ethic of exam-passers: an ethic of those who know, however elegantly they may disguise their knowledge, that the road to success is paved with alphas. For most of his time at Balliol, Jenkins devoted most of his energies to the Union and the extraordinarily convoluted politics of the Labour and democratic socialist clubs. But halfway ...”

“... the non-racial project as a naive hoax, a dangerous illusion. Activists in the Congress tradition may argue about whether non-racialism is merely ‘a form that the struggle takes’ (Max Sisulu) or its essential content and objective. Julie Frederikse, a former Harare-based American journalist, firmly declares it an ‘unbreakable thread’. However, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s teasingly affectionate tone differed considerably from the ...”

“... machinery is here Clear day, clear room, plain desk, The hand, symbol of power, Here the veins may pour Into the deed, as the field Into the standing corn. The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. This same poem tells us that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... counter-revolution the economic element carries more weight than the cultural one. Mrs Thatcher may not have succeeded in her declared aim of ‘killing socialism’, but some at least of her privatisation, de-regulation and demotion of union rights has come to stay. Indeed Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley are making it increasingly plain that many items of ...”

“... sample! The authors’ eagerness to produce statements which are true for the nation as a whole may be attractive to politicians but could result in sociological nonsense. Statistics applied to large samples of very large populations effectively eliminate from consideration all exceptional cases. But if generalisations approximating to laws of nature are to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... causes of the indifference English critics have on the whole maintained toward literary theory. It may even have served to justify indifference to what Northrop Frye called for, and called ‘a coherent and comprehensive theory of literature, logically and scientifically organised, some of which the student unconsciously learns as he goes on, but the main ...”

“... say less? I wasn’t for a moment pretending to characterise the nature of the relations that may conduce to that possibility – relations, on your part I mean, with the man to be divorced, which in themselves are none of my business at all. But your position, as a result of those relations – if I had it to speak of again I am afraid I could only speak ...”