“... 1925 that between around 1910 and 1924 about a quarter of the land of England changed hands? It may well be true, but how did the author know, and who was he? Hard-nosed economic historians will not be happy with the statistical underpinnings of the argument for an economic decline and fall, even if they can hardly challenge Cannadine’s overall ...”

“... at the door of Sasha’s horrible hotel room, is certainly memorable. The strange comfort of it may be the drug the Rhys addict goes for, for the commis voyageur is everything to be fled from which becomes our fate in the end. Good Morning, Midnight finally appeared on the eve of the Second World War, and vanished without trace. No one at that time was ...”

“... concreteness of such a passage is matched by its pervasive nausea. The poem as a whole may seem vague and histrionic and shot to pieces, but individual words and lines are of such force and brilliance that they make the efforts of other translators appear puny. The first three lines are unsurpassable, and the vigour of what follows argues the case ...”

“... the stone, and found it shattered into little pieces. This theme – that too much praise may be the next best thing to murder – has been taken up in America, where several books have recounted the miserable fate of the first novelist who meets with overwhelming success and then spends the rest of his life calamitously struggling to keep up with ...”

“... of nearly two centuries, absence of mourning, and forgetfulness, are difficult to pin down. It may be true, as Bowlby proposes in the epilogue, comparing Darwin’s case with that of a 20th-century woman who had lost her mother as a young child, that ‘had he embarked on psychotherapy, Darwin ... might also have recalled some of the items he was ...”

“... of Asian rice-eaters can be met for the next thirty years. Industrial investment in the South may also increase. This investment, it’s true, is now heavily skewed away from the poorest parts of the world. But global or multinational corporations, and the increasing number of ‘trans-nationals’ also (firms which devolve more of their decisions to the ...”

“... generate an infinite number of testable propositions about reality: so the successful theory may nevertheless contain a huge quantity of undiscovered falsehoods, larger even than a theory that has hitherto failed most of our tests. It is thus impossible to see how a theory’s ability to stir vive our best efforts at refutation can establish that it ...”

“... in the text; he even produces a refinement of them by claiming that although William Joyce may not have committed ‘high treason’, he was nevertheless guilty of what can be called ‘moral treason’. The most significant question of all, however, is whether it is still possible to use terms such as ‘patriotism’ and ‘treason’ in the old ...”

“... unaffected by this kind of attention. His brassiness has the hollow ring of insecurity. Perhaps we may thank Blackmur in part for the largely unfortunate increase in ‘content’ which the 40 Cantos written in the next seven years displayed. Pound had come to intellectual consciousness at the time of Fin de Siècle aestheticism and its hearty aftermath, and ...”

“... aspire to exclusivity’. Why unification remained such a sacred tenet is more mysterious than it may first appear. As Garton Ash points out, the influence of those organisations with a vested interest in reunification – the expellees from Silesia and the Sudentenland – waned steadily from the Fifties onwards. In West Germany popular pressure for ...”

“... but ‘those who see the 11th and 12th centuries as a time of particularly significant change may be able to make a better case than most.’ Southern was effectively the first to make this case. Not since Burckhardt had epoch-making change in European history been so decisively charted. It was Southern rather than Charles Homer Haskins, inventor of the ...”

“... servants to something like market pressures. This was not in itself a despicable ambition and it may lead to greater flexibility and efficiency. But the most important result of the reform will be (already has been) to distance the agencies even further from those they are supposed to serve. Severing their already exiguous connection to Parliament makes them ...”

“... when it is passionately sexual, intellectual and emotional all at once, is like a supernova. It may burn you up. Afterwards there may be nothing but a black hole of loss and shame. And yet without these conflagrations, there would be nothing in the first place, no life, no meaning at all. And ordinary life – which ...”

“... of going from third to first place in a considerable number of seats. This ‘Foot deficit’ may well live on to haunt Labour leaders into the next century, and with it will go the memory of Foot as the most disastrous Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald. All of which is a considerable pity, for Foot is undoubtedly one of the nicest and most decent men ...”

“... contest. But with the Literature award, there is always the lurking suspicion that the Committee may have given too much weight to its criterion favouring ‘literature of an idealistic nature’. There are laureates who are unequivocally deserving on straight literary criteria – O’Neill, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Singer, Bellow, Morrison. There are ...”