“... Room ‘carefully composed and grandly furnished’, with the door always left open so that all may see the whisky set, the sherry decanter and glasses, the cocktail-shaker, the three smokers’ stands, all of them wedding presents whose display is obligatory but which, since the Malouf parents don’t drink or smoke, are meant as ‘a warning, richly ...”

“... pioneers mole down into the earth to find a place to weather out the days, weeks, even years that may well, but for these, kill off our race. Considering their fear it’s maybe kinder when they burrow in the ground like gophers do not to offer them the sobering reminder that rattlesnakes use gopher burrows too. However layered with rocks and earth the ...”

“... will bring all this to an end, there comes instead the slam of darkness, silence, solitude. It may be for minutes only, as I have said, that I am safe; it may be for days and nights on end. Empty days, empty nights. Anyone looking at me would think that I am completely comatose, even lifeless, a rag, nothing more than a ...”

“... the ultimate astonisher’. Plots, endings, opinions develop purposes of their own, which may reduce the confusions of life without explaining them, and it is the ‘hilariously expostulating narrative voice’ – the voice of men and novels, of sequence and logic, a voice she responded to and knew how to use – which Dorothy Richardson set out to ...”

“... impose a preconceived pattern on such parts of the evidence as he chooses to examine. Procrustes may have had a tidy mind, but one has doubts about his methodology. On all of these counts Roger Magraw’s book invites serious reservations. He is not much interested in events. His treatment of the 1830 revolution is typical. ‘In July 1830 three days of ...”

“... main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him. One of the pavilions ought entirely to be appropriated for women and children and the other ought to contain the kitchen with apartments for Men servants ...”

“... Robert d’Aubuisson of Salvador. If British involvement and documentation seem minimal, this may simply be because that famous repository of guilty secrets, the Foreign Office, ‘deliberated for six months, then announced that no papers would be released, on the grounds that events which took place in 1946 might yet endanger national security.’ The ...”

“... was on the ground floor, she had only scratches. What more did Marie-Jo want from her father? It may occur to the reader that, with all the casual sex in the household, the daughter might have thought: why not some for herself? Yet ‘society’ frowns on this, and Marie-Jo, like everyone else, would have been aware of that. If incest leaves no mark on the ...”

“... nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all would-be revolutionaries; and one suspects that those ...”

“... to the Book Marketing Council’s ‘Best Novels of Our Time’ hype, and many of its quirks may have to do with his displeasure at having been, shall we say, disincluded from that list of the elect. Wherever possible, he sees to it that their taste is rebuked by his. He starts off by lopping two titles from the BMC list on the grounds that neither of ...”

“... as misusing the language. Instead, they would hold that if someone believes, say, that each person may favour himself over others whether or not that will work out to everyone’s advantage in the long run, then he is in substantive moral disagreement with utilitarianism at a fundamental level. This is a disagreement not over logic or the facts, but over the ...”

“... critical reading of Trollope with which, since she doesn’t mention it, I assume she may not be familiar. This conceives Trollope as the prime example of the Victorian ‘divided mind’, as it is called. Secondly, Letwin’s argument (if one accepted it) would explain the drastic slump in Trollope’s reputation immediately after his death in ...”

“... given by the Palmerstons. Everyone knew whom Disraeli meant when he said in a public speech in May 1858: ‘Leading organs of the press are now place hunters of the Cabal, and the once stern guardians of popular rights simper in the enervating atmosphere of gilded saloons.’ But Disraeli never believed in permanent enmities – nor, for that matter, in ...”

“... at Bradford, Rochdale and Colchester, a tower was essential. ‘Useless and extravagant’ they may have been, with their pinnacles, turrets, spires and cupolas, decorated with sculpture, statuary, battlements and gargoyles. But, like church spires, these town hall towers expressed the sentiments of their builders, and articulated a powerful system of ...”

“... distinguishes it from the accumulation of heirlooms, trophies and religious relics, and this may be why he does not remark that objects in museums (far more than in private collections) often serve to remind us of the age, continuity and hence importance of our civilisation, enable us to imagine that we have transcended the savagery but assimilated the ...”