“... 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 ...”

“... from the order of the contexts in which they appear, and which their appearance disrupts and may eventually alter’. (Which perhaps, in language as little figurative as possible, is simply to give the imagination its ‘amoral’ freedom, and then remind it of its ultimate moral obligation, its duty to reality.) At all events, to speak of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a sleazeball. Her peppering of the subsequent conversation with literary and artistic references may, I suppose, be a ploy to deter his advances: more likely, it’s the author’s way of smuggling in the allusive baggage which she feels (mistakenly) will give the novel resonance. These awkwardly colloquial manoeuvrings (‘You ever read the Russian ...”

“... the Ark. God’s great eugenic plan does not include them, but they are also excluded – and, it may be, destroyed – by a failure of imagination. It would be wrong to reduce the otherness of Maxwell’s poems by turning them too much into allegories, political or spiritual. His poetry outruns conclusive interpretation; for all its intertextual ...”

“... itself it is, well, itselves, a sort of shimmering incorrigible monolith of fixed attitudes that may or may not be shifting slightly. (‘Protestants Cannot be Forced Into A United Ireland – Sinn Fein,’ reads a headline on page four of the Irish Times. Maybe in the talks, maybe there’ll be some federal arrangement? I ...”

“... said, but one of the merits of this book is that the writer clearly points the way to anyone who may feel like such an undertaking. One of the reasons Bridges has been neglected is probably the prevalent though quite inaccurate idea that his life was serene and sheltered; readers do not like that sort of thing. Certainly he was wealthy, happily ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... classes of physical phenomena – dynamical, electrical, chemical, biological etc. Here again we may feel the tension that goes unfelt by Searle: how can mental phenomena fail to be reducible to physical phenomena within the brain, if, as Searle asserts, they ultimately arise from nothing other than the complex interactions of those physical phenomena with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Suez: theirs is the triumphalist tone of the Falklands, taking a robust view of the methods that may regrettably be necessary to govern empires. ‘It was brutal, savage and above all degrading,’ Warner writes with approval of the humiliation of Mahmoud: ‘Kitchener knew exactly what he was doing.’ Royle is less explicit, but he glosses over all the ...”