“... candour, at least on so illustrious a level, it has lost none of its force. The application may be more subtle but the game’s the same. The disappearance of old cronies, even older brandies and cigars, has in no sense limited the scope for prime ministerial wiles. Indeed, the advent of television has led those set in authority over us to ever fresh ...”

“... and French country cooking, of a kind which in France is being replaced by pizzas and hamburgers, may be raptly savoured in rural England.The eponymous ‘Chez Panisse’ of the Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook is directly inspired by Mrs David, who now spans the globe. The cook-proprietor of ‘Chez Panisse’, Alice Waters, says in her introduction: ‘I bought ...”

“... powers of observation. In English country society, ‘the men talk together; the lady of the house may be addressed once in a way as a duty – but they had rather talk together ... they have no notion that a lady’s conversation is better than a man’s.’ She was not used to such attitudes: ‘For some sixty years she was the centre of a circle – or ...”

“... The pompousness of his sermons and the cold violence of his quarrelling are equally depressing. It may be thought that Middleton Murry deserved all he got, but it wasn’t for his highminded meddling and fornicating that Lawrence called him ‘a dirty little worm’ three times over in the same letter: it was because Murry had turned down some articles of ...”

“... example, normal chimp and normal human haemoglobin differ by only one unit, and this difference may well be quite inconsequential. Meanwhile some humans have another type of haemoglobin differing by another single unit. This difference has huge consequences. On the one hand, it gives its possessor resistance to malaria, and on the other hand it produces the ...”

“... in which Frank Kermode and I and until lately Helen Gardner have severally earned our keep? We may believe indeed that the Oxford English Faculty maintained, while Dame Helen was a member of it, a standard of considerate civility by which our own institutions may be judged and found grievously wanting, though gossip ...”

“... facto, about his or her own work is not necessarily more valid than anything the serious outsider may say of it. But with work so interpenetrated with the writer as woman, this position cannot be held. It is best to start with something that Rosamond Lehmann herself has said about her work. In a late book, the autobiographical fragments of 1967 called The ...”

“... questions about the moral implications of art. The actual pictures and prints of this period may not make one’s mouth water as the earlier work does, but this sober and reflective and perplexed late Dürer is essential to the whole. It is also the starting-point of the first great episode of mythopoeic thinking about him, which took place during the ...”

“... further study in themselves – that of Hartich Sierk of North Ditmarsh: ‘God send that there may be an end at last; God send that there may be peace again. God in Heaven send us peace.’ Parker himself refers more than once to the war memoirs of an English mercenary, Captain Sydnam Poyntz (there seems to have been no ...”

“... Hemingway and Lardner. The faux naif pose with its short, simple sentences and dumb-ass narrators may appear a direct route to the real world beyond literature – but it has never actually been that (unless one goes back to Huck Finn). Hemingway’s vision was distorted by romanticism and Lardner’s by misanthropy. Their legacy is a short story tradition ...”

“... with the famous poet and leader of the struggle for Greek independence? We do not know. But he may have remembered his liaison with the English lord as the happiest and most notable adventure of his boyhood. And Byron, who later managed to make the lives of so many women miserable, must have looked back on the affair with a certain satisfaction. That ...”

“... depend for their power on the implicit irony that, in Catullus’s words: Sunnes, that set, may rise againe: But if once we loose this light, ’Tis, with us, perpetuall night. If we must have utility, some is to be found as a by-product of the main achievement of the first half of the book, the disentangling and tracing of the various schemes of the ...”

“... of utterance. And yet there are causes of astonishment’ – inarticulateness – ‘which may befall the good as well as the bad.’ Most wonderfully of all, Perkins’s proposition that even a deathbed accusation of witchcraft should be used not as evidence but only as a basis for investigation was superseded in the late 18th century by a doctrine of ...”

“... its rebellions only contribute to a debased fulfilment of its ideology’s impossible goals; there may be something inherently Stalinist about the Russian people, the book comes close to suggesting. It is most unfortunate that his English publisher has chosen to issue an abridged version of The Madhouse which omits ‘some of the more serious sociological and ...”

“... lord will one day be known as the god of war,’ and that the pact between God and men may amount only to ‘two articles, namely, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’ Satan, in a bitter recasting of his characterisation in The Gospel according to Jesus Christ, ‘is just another instrument of the lord, the one who does the dirty work ...”