“... in this case, the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham – and even there, alas, such a job may not be possible again. What are the attractions of following up on this immense initiative? The major one, for literary scholars, must be the provision of a new perspective on Renaissance poetry, drama, literary criticism and history. Drama, Binns notes, has ...”

“... was decisive, absolutely decisive, which it still is, to my mind, despite all the criticisms we may have of the Soviet Union.’ A decade ago, such arguments were not uncommon within the CP. Today, that has all gone. Death, Gorbachev and the irreversible fracturing of the Communist Party under the pressure of the Marxism Today generation have accomplished a ...”

“... the desired changes in the shortest possible time.’ Here, at last, the draft’s authors may have permitted themselves to see into the life of things. For what has underlain the perestroika process until its present, fragmented stage is precisely that feeling – one of the most insidious and widespread legacies of Stalinism – that an effort of ...”

“... two documents which destroyed his case. (If, as Mr Horne thinks, they had come into my hands in May 1963, they would also have destroyed the Labour Party’s whole stand on the Profumo affair.) The first document was not sensational. It was a memorandum from Wigg to Wilson – a boring blow-by-blow account of Wigg’s assiduous sniffing around: he fancied ...”

“... from the dreary repetition of past error – so long as we see theory for what it really is (which may not be how all theorists see it). ‘As I use the term here’, Graff states, literary theory is not ‘a set of systematic principles, necessarily, or a founding philosophy but simply an inquiry into assumptions, premises, and legitimising principles and ...”

“... the reader understand all, and hope those you see will forgive each other. In novels Australians may think more than they say. What do Digger and Vic, in The Great World, talk about? Does Vic talk about the money he has made?   ‘Doesn’t ’e talk to you about it?’ he asked Digger.   ‘No. Why should ’e? I don’t know anything about ...”

“... to reward or punish those he still had traffic with. It seems from Mr Lenzner’s book that he may have nursed a certain resentment about having so much money, because there was no way he could prevent his family from eventually getting some of it. He found at least a partial solution: in his will he left all his Getty Oil shares, the bulk of his ...”

“... phrase fatally unaware of what the word ‘intriguing’ might imply), readers of this book, too, may need reassurance. I have little to give them as far as Shelton’s own opinions, style or narrative ability are concerned. They are, respectively, uninteresting, impoverished and nil. Shelton sees himself as an investigative insider, neither fully privileged ...”

“... literary and artistic – Krautheimer’s judgment that he was ‘decidedly no intellectual’ may err on the side of severity. Like his ancestor Agostino Chigi, who had employed Raphael and Baldassare Peruzzi to decorate his villa, Alexander was a great patron of the arts. He does not seem to have cared very much for painting, but he loved ...”

“... Social prejudice and literary convention conspire, however, to make it difficult, try as one may, to take seriously someone who writes like one of Dickens’s or Smollett’s grotesques. There is abundant evidence, too, that she spoke as she wrote: one aristocratic lady noted that Emma’s pronunciation was ‘very vulgar’; an earl more charitably ...”

“... editorship of McKenzie and Ian Willison) will follow the Darnton model in its main outline and may indeed have been inspired by it.* Darnton has moved on from Publishing History (more’s the pity). The essay that will attract most interest in The Kiss of Lamourette is the author’s reply to Chartier’s criticisms of The Great Cat Massacre. Now called ...”

“... conditions of work of all people under the age of 21 totally out of regulation, so that employers may now, within the law, employ juveniles at any rate of pay whatever. Objections to that move did not, I think, stem as Hahn would have it from ‘intellectual laziness’ or ‘stupidity’, but from dismay that the Government should have dismantled a ...”

“... April 1935 was sold out and the public showered him with flowers. The programme was repeated on 3 May in front of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels. On 10 May it was announced that Furtwängler would be the chief conductor at Bayreuth in 1936. Hitler began to turn up at his concerts more often, and engaged him to conduct Die ...”

“... was Africa, I was in Africa.’ The important idea here is that the sins of colonial forebears may be visited on hapless sons; that the past strips the European bare of any innocence in Africa. But again this politics is coarse – a natural history of empire – and can only crystallise around a sense of danger. ‘They knew that I was white, and the only ...”

“... the book, that helps to bring the argument into sharp focus: ‘You have granted that woman may be hung, therefore you must grant that woman may vote.’ An occasional touch of humour lightens the darkness without trivialising: one female prisoner, whose shotgun went off accidentally, told the author, ‘When I get ...”