“... fundamentally kind and respectable, though they like to be thought of as a bit diabolic. Unlike May Laffan, the Dublin novelist and another of the Rector’s friends, she got on well with Mrs Pattison, who tolerated her husband’s little ways with martyred and self-regarding composure. Meta and Pattison met where they could: in London, walking in ...”

“... by disillusions and defeats. Memory is not merely unreliable, it is unstable. This may not invalidate the practice of history, whether written or oral, but it does require historians and auto-biographers to think about what they do, rather than just do it. Both ‘The Good War’ and Truth, Dare or Promise, though they differ in every other ...”

“... teenaged hero, Clay, suggests that a marginal humanity and a minimal faculty of moral choice may survive the ordeal of being a rich kid in LA, where the ‘phoniness’ so dreaded by Holden Caulfield is sickly and violently rampant. But neither Ellis as writer nor Clay as narrator suggests the comedy which is so essential to Salinger’s book – a ...”

“... an honourable English colonel (retired), recalling the words of a high-up republican, or – it may be – an RUC inspector. Ireland – or, to be specific, Northern Ireland – has these people in its deadly grip. Lonely the man without heroes is the second volume of Power’s projected trilogy entitled ‘Children of the North’. Out of the north – to ...”

“... decided, that the transition to democracy after the death of Franco proceeded so successfully. He may well be right. But this may be yet another example of how Spanish history has been used by outsiders as a means of expressing their own preoccupations: the Germans who had to flee from Hitler’s Germany believed that the ...”

“... His political statements were always personal, never party-dictated. Labour between the wars may have agreed with Low’s portrayal of the Government’s remoteness from the reality of unemployment (‘In Different Worlds’) – or the futility of Anglo-French ‘non-intervention’ in Spain (‘Heah. I say, fair play!’ Eden remonstrates with Fascist ...”

“... himself on a winning streak when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is – convincing. But no one has positively disproved Shakespeare’s involvement, and given the conventional ...”

“... chill aperçu that the reason ‘emulation and contention’ were endemic among anatomists may have been that ‘the passive submission of dead bodies, their common objects’, rendered them ‘less able to bear contradiction’. The daring of Outram’s undertaking, by contrast, lies precisely in its reaching for the parts specialist history of ...”

“... had it not been for her association with him. It has even been claimed, however paradoxical this may seem, that the works which appeared under her name had actually been written by Sartre. Beauvoir’s writings may be uneven, her autobiographical works should not be treated as completely reliable, not all of her novels or ...”

“... was there so large and avid a readership for romantic fiction? Literature is not life: it may draw on the unfulfilled wishes of life, but unless its social and emotional premises can be recognised from life, it will be unintelligible. Even if we dismiss imaginative literature, there remains the evidence of diaries. There, as Keith Wrightson has ...”

“... in its first form was typed in the summer of 1947 and completed by October. Between the middle of May 1948 and early November 1948 Orwell revised the work, and the final typescript was sent to Secker and Warburg on 4 December. The English edition was published on 8 June 1949, the American a few days later. Only pages 25-38 – Goldstein’s testament – of ...”

“... I see you were well trained in Hindu logic by your guru. But I hope under this roof the climate may be more conducive to truth than to lies. At least, that is the way we are trying to bring up our children.’ Is a high – perhaps excessive – regard for factual truth another step in the process of Westernisation? It is hard to say because Masterji, by ...”

“... after his death by the Christian Church. Methodology provides the criteria by which these issues may be settled. Methodology is on two levels: that of overall heuristic judgments, and that of minute examination of texts. On the microscopic level, modern New Testament study offers form-criticism, source-criticism and redaction-criticism. K. Schubert, in a ...”

“... to me probably true that ‘politics’ is the prime category of historical explanation: but it may also be true that certain realities of power are ineluctable, whether politically conscious people actually talk about them or not. Autopsies on the Labour Party seem to be in fashion, perhaps prematurely in view of the fact that the patient is by no means ...”

“... imitate them is considerably more outspoken. As Stone puts it, in his inimitably vivid manner, it may now be ‘time for the historical rats to leave rather than to scramble aboard the social scientific ship which seems to be leaking and undergoing major repair’. He goes on to specify ‘three ways in which the social science-oriented historians seem at the ...”