“... is evident. True, the same media have rendered other voters incapable of reading at all, but one may still hope for a trickle-down effect on them. A second merit of brevity is that it demands clarity. There is no room for the pretentious jargon which still afflicts much writing in the social sciences. Here the historian, who generally writes prose, is at ...”

“... white with the ‘horror of life’. In fact, this was often how they saw themselves. Disease may be the great leveller, the only effective manifestation of the democratic spirit, but for these men it often became a sign of grace and unique destiny. The 19th century was perhaps the only one that proclaimed that art was bad for you. Contemporary medical ...”

“... are literal addresses, presupposing a divine listener; dialogues written up after the event may be reports of transactions believed ‘really’ to have taken place. In any such transaction, God has always been deemed a direct participant. But Herbert’s poems are fictions ‘which imitate or represent prayer’, and in some ways this book extends to ...”

“... though by no means uncritical, view of his poets – quite properly, since some persuasion may be needed to encourage readers to tackle writers with names such as Walahfrid the Squinter and Notker the Stutterer, not to speak of the outlandish ‘Nepos Cracavist’. At its worst, and not infrequently, the poetry in his book suffers from a pervasive ...”

“... people, representing himself as ‘a willing pair of ears’. He tells us that this volume may be taken to be the sequel to his autobiographical Sprightly Running, published in 1962, but he does himself an injustice, presenting himself merely as a compliant fellow who had the luck to run into various peculiar, talented and amiable people to whom he had ...”

“... have especially interesting lives, but because any life is an allegory of all the others and ‘may serve to reassure, comfort, thwart ambition, reconcile the reader to the pain and frustration he has previously believed were reserved for him alone’. When we see this life as randy, bohemian, hung over, haunted by the pop songs of the epoch, plagued by ...”

“... The most terrifying comment made on the Abdication may well be that of Lord Beaverbrook, writing twenty years after the events in which he played such a prominent part: if the British people, he said, had been less absorbed in the affair of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson the energy thus saved might have been used to avert world war ...”

“... The media attention accorded to acts of infamy may or may not figure in the motivations of mass killers, but it must certainly count among the compensations of homicide as a moral career. In the wake of his conviction for murdering and dismembering six lonely young men at that dreaded address, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen must have basked in the thought that, even behind bars, he was still free to roam through the darker corners of the minds of all those people who had scorned or ignored him when he was a Job Centre counsellor and a pub bore ...”

“... had a worldly political purpose. Many of the Surrealists claimed an adherence to Communism that may have embarrassed more run-of-the-mill Party members, but that was nonetheless sincere. The collectivisation of art, entailing, of course, the abolition of the artist as ‘property-owner’ of his work, was an important part of the Surrealist campaign. The ...”

“... preface to his Collected Poems (1963): ‘A poet who has been too a sharp critic of other poets may ruefully expect even sharper criticism than his poems deserve.’ He may expect it, but let us disappoint his expectations. Suppose we reject the tit-for-tat, beggar-my-neighbour principle on which Grigson’s literary ...”

“... of Eden’ because ‘honesty demands that he describes it to his readers, so that they may be in a position to judge his judgments.’ Even though psychoanalysis ironises dreams of Eden – in psychoanalytic theory paradise is only for the losers – it would be useful for psychoanalysts to say something about these things, about the kind of world ...”

“... cited sees it, or expects it to be – would have been a peculiarly sterile exercise. Irony may be felt to hover around Scott’s reflections on the dogs who fell into a crevasse: ‘Even while they dangled, howling in agony, they still continued to bite and tear at one another. Such uncivilised behaviour went some way towards dulling compassion for ...”

“... believe that government should be minimal because it gets in the way of those processes. You may agree or disagree; but that is the free-market position. Mr Davidson, however, has chanced upon chaos theory and the new discovery of the old truth that there are discontinuities in market behaviour: that straws can break the smoothly functioning free market ...”

“... prevent her illness from getting worse. N.’s lawyers had one last shot: the House of Lords. On 5 May this year (the day of the general election) the Lords published their judgment. They agreed with the Court of Appeal. Lord Hope of Craighead held that: The function of a judge in a case of this kind . . . is not to issue decisions based on sympathy. Just ...”

“... and meritless litigation. Just as a tiny minority of benefit claimants abuse the system, there may be a few reckless souls, egged on by lawyers, who play legal roulette with chips supplied by the taxpayer. But for every one of them, there are scores of others who need legal advice because they are in a crisis. The government isn’t interested in ...”