“... breakdown if participation became widespread. Seen in isolation, poverty and political alienation may appear undesirable, but in the wider perspective one can argue that even the worst-off would be made worse-off by attempts to improve their situation. Sociodicy as a legitimating device has been closely wedded to functionalism as an explanatory ...”

“... work. They stand at opposite ends of the century that runs from the 1740s to the 1840s, but they may be thought to bear each other out, in ways which affect an understanding of the family life of that time, and of its incorporation in the literature of Romanticism – that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple ...”

“... The business imagination has been coming into its own in other ways as well. Management Studies may still be considered disreputable in some quarters of the university, but it is no longer that makeshift department of Nissen huts kept off the well-tended preserves of the traditional academic disciplines. The liberal academy’s green-belt areas are now well ...”

“... identifiable restaurants, doctors and nurses are equally frank and usually entertaining. Wives may, as in this book, be a little too reverential when they write about their husbands. There is, however, some criticism here. Early in their marriage she had grumbled at what seemed excessive hours of work in the lab and got the reply: ‘You have first claim ...”

“... In May 1945 I was serving with a battalion of the British Eighth Army in victorious occupation of Gorizia, some thirty miles north of Trieste. We shared the town with a brigade of Yugoslav Partisans, and the relations between us were not good. Our lords and masters had decreed that the Partisans should be, for the time being, in charge of civil administration, while we confined ourselves to military duties ...”

“... hatred of the Nazis was greater than his hatred of ‘the English Empire’.* Eliot and MacLean may be seen as poles apart. What they shared was more important. Each was impelled by a duty to his language, by the necessity of modernising its capacities and fighting its insularities; each was to become a cultural figurehead, the quintessential representative ...”

“... these is Meg, and another her friend Theo. Such names, such circumstances, are no coincidence, and may make this a Christian romance – the exemplum without the sermon, so to speak. The Joneses have the interest – and no other – of the significance which can be read into their reclusiveness, and that significance may be ...”

“... a blind eye on forbidden infidel activities, providing no Saudis are ‘corrupted’. Europeans may brew their home-made hooch, and discreetly indulge in extra-marital sex, so long as they remain in their hotel rooms or compounds, though technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering ...”

“... the recrudescence of political brutality was only a matter of time, lampoons or no lampoons. This may be called the siphon theory of political possibility. It is very melancholy, and superbly conveyed by Garcia Marquez. We see tyranny – in the brief span of 17 days – finding its level in the Town through a series of partly careless, partly amiable, partly ...”

“... but it is true.’ ‘The terror-fantasies of one generation,’ he reminds us later, ‘may – like some of the writings of Kafka – eerily anticipate the realities of the next.’ This, of course, was the starting-point of Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 treatise From Caligari to Hitler: but Professor Prawer finds broader and deeper justification for ...”

“... the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry VIII, opened, and that could have made Michael a good-luck charm in Alex’s eyes. But Michael is neither a film buff nor a historian of the ...”

“... which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself up with the masters may be studied in Bartlett’s Unfamiliar Quotations, compiled by Leonard Louis Levenson, which contains more than a hundred and eighty entries credited to L.L.L.; in A Treasury of Humorous Quotations, compiled by Herbert V. Prochnow and Herbert V. Prochnow ...”

“... danger of “seeing the light”, “being saved” etc is that this tremendous experience may deceive the newly converted into believing that his spiritual journey is over.’ He is perfectly right, as any ci-devant member of a hellfire sect can confirm. In the testimony meetings of my youth, so much weight was put on the essential instantaneousness ...”

“... After all, much domestic life goes unrecorded in letters or even journals. The literary biographer may sometimes have a device for penetrating this silence: he uses the autobiographical subtext of his subject’s books. Richard Holmes gives a perfect illustration of how this may legitimately and convincingly be done through ...”

“... of events in nearly all known human societies has been set by men? And, however undesirable this may have been, does not the resulting bias of the sources interpose near-insuperable obstacles for those concerned with the place of women in societies not responsive to statistical or anthropological analysis? There is the further difficulty that women’s ...”