“... period of primitive agriculture, according to modern anthropology. Thus, one person’s golden age may well be another’s stone age. The last golden age of criticism was probably in 18th-century Europe, and was called the ‘age of reason’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ by its enthusiasts, the ‘age of brass’ by its contemporary detractors, and the ‘age ...”

“... win lower-class support for it. We might suggest that the Parliamentary leaders – whose rhetoric may in any case have been more concerned to rally their backbenchers than to dupe the commonalty – were more persuaded by their own propaganda than Trevor-Roper allows, but if so they can still be charged with irresponsible and dangerous ...”

“... by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls. It may not have been the same remark, of course: but since Amis was Larkin’s close friend, and Larkin a great letter-writer, and since the words on the page served suddenly to bring back a long-past occasion, it seems possible that a series of sentences has ...”

“... that is the theory; actual usage is far more complex). There are also languages in which nouns may take more than one case-ending, as when in Old Georgian a noun in the genitive further adds the same case-ending as the noun it qualifies; but even English can contribute the double genitives hers and theirs, and shares with Danish the phrasal genitive the ...”

“... the media and the political interests that so often govern them. Evidence of death and destruction may be immediate, flashed across the world in real time by the major networks as on 11 September 2001, or it may take time to be sifted through alternative websites and sources (easier to access in some places than ...”

“... The​ Labour Party may be the largest party after the next election, and it may even secure a majority, but it could also do very badly. These alternatives show Labour’s decline since the first couple of years of the coalition, when a Labour victory in 2015 was (more or less) confidently predicted ...”

“... the Perhaps Party. Superstition is one of the older religions of the Don’t Knows. For some, it may be a positive assertion of faith in supernatural forces, but for many it is a foggy compromise between knowledge and ignorance, an insurance policy that may or may not stop things going ...”

“... He develops a thesis about the decline of leaderships and authority in Britain which may or may not be right, but which lends the book a vision and a theme. To write of post-war Britain is to enter a long-running debate over the state of the nation which began about 1960 and has continued ever since. Many ...”

“... wide range of questions which occur (or should have occurred) to any intelligent reader. The title may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about evidence and historical truth, not ...”

“... as much as from Paine that radicals adopted the notion of ‘priestcraft’. I think that Volney may have had an even more direct influence on Blake than Jon Mee acknowledges. Passages in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell echo Volney’s book, and ‘The Human Abstract’ follows its argument. (Jon Mee scarcely notices the Songs and remarks at one point that ...”

“... but rather, to speak crassly, for what politically can be got out of it, for the services which it may offer in orientating and confirming political commitments which he judges beneficent. These preoccupations leave him with a complex and not altogether harmonious set of purposes, and one which he plainly finds almost as difficult to keep clear in his own mind ...”

“... its detail that gives the novel its substance. What it has to say about the psychology of revolt may seem thin beside – and in any case is dependent on – the assurance with which it treats of Boer family life, Khoin legend, crops and cattle, stonework and mud walls, smithy and threshing-floor. The slave Galant grows up on the farm at Lagenvlei with his ...”

“... that are more than metaphors, are not likely to go away.Literature is full of examples, which may be especially instructive when they don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think ...”

“... for granted that there is a wound in the (modern) artist, it is interesting to be reminded that we may have been looking for it in the wrong place, that we might have the wrong picture of how suffering turns into words. Writers don’t suffer with ideas, they suffer in style. ‘Everything,’ writes Axel Vander, the sly hero-narrator of John Banville’s ...”

“... critical capacity to apply tests of commonsense when it came to putting ideas into action’. It may be tempting to think that, had her university course included economics in place of chemistry, she might have clung less obstinately to these doctrines: at least she would have heard alternatives persuasively argued (she was ten years old when the publication ...”