“... for instance, is entirely understandable. It is possible, therefore, that Labour in government may behave differently from Labour in opposition – but at the moment I doubt it. The argument for rewriting Clause IV is by now well-known. The old Clause IV, it is said, might have been appropriate for the Britain of 1918 or 1945 but it was wholly ...”

“... inappropriate because they were thought to be distasteful. In this case political squeamishness may have had a point: what was found objectionable might have increased prejudice against PWAs without making any difference to sexual behaviour. Garfield points to an analogous irony: homophobic Aids stories in the tabloid press ...”

“... merged with the dictates of a Calvinism that Genovese finds appealing. The ethic of honour may have been an imperfect scheme for preserving social order, but it upheld most of those principles that Genovese most admires. A second lapse is Genovese’s underestimation of Southern Catholic intellectuality. To be sure, he discusses the affinity of ...”

“... topographical pattern of the sort familiar from the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Iain Sinclair. She may be a husbandless housewife living in a rundown seaside resort, but she is no ordinary housewife from a seaside town. When Miller mentions his computer password, she immediately announces what hers would be if she had such a thing: ‘ “Ikkoku”, which is ...”

“... or ‘bread’ or ‘the hatred of town people for country people’. His main focus may be the 16th and 17th centuries, but he will turn back into the Middle Ages or project forward into the 19th century with no sense of incongruity if there’s any chance of enlisting material. Contemptuous of the pettifogging exactitudes of the historian ...”

“... how such a modern self as yourself was much less content to be nothing much. Sexual intercourse may have started in 1963, with the Beatles’ first LP and so on, but intercourse of many another sort was at the same time starting to stop. Drinking and dancing went on, but in a different way – the clubs stopped being places where young and old of a similar ...”

“... in antique shops. But lack of supporting evidence gradually consigned it to parlour games (‘May I feel your bumps?’) and sideshows at the fair. By the time What Asylums Were, Are and Ought to Be was published in 1837, Browne was no longer relying on bumps to solve the insanity problem. It was an influential and idealistic book. The asylum that ought ...”

“... a poem grafted onto a sturdier stock’ but Borges decreed that ‘unlike the novel, it may be essential.’ That has an ominous sound. None of these suggestions seems to fit the way in which V.S. Pritchett wrote his novels and stories. Many are absolute masterpieces, no doubt about that: but the master who wrote them did not think his own process ...”

“... by the left elbow, pencil at the right. The image is smudged; one has a skull beside him, one may be a woman, one may be H.G. Wells. They are looking up at the camera; after the shutter has closed they will look down their microscopes and see what they are told to see, for microscopy is a mystery and Huxley its ...”

“... dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a trooper, soldiering on towards the day he would make a name for himself. ‘It was his audacity that endeared him to those people,’ he wrote in a school essay on the Dutch painter, Kees Van Dongen and the ...”

“... spokesman for Social Darwinism and the gospel of work, while Izabela, the aristocratic beauty who may or may not be the ‘doll’ of the title, is first seen reading a novel by Zola. Wokulski is in love with Izabela and gains considerable power over her, but, besides being a heartless flirt, she can never get over the fact ...”

“... Expeditionary forces and the French Armies from the very first days of the First World War up to May 1917. In 1915 when the failure of ‘his’ Dardanelles expedition had lost him his Cabinet seat, Churchill had gone back to soldiering. He had been offered the command of a brigade on the now entrenched Western Front, and had tried unsuccessfully to get this ...”

“... such staples of scholarly debate as the differences between the earlier and the later Plato. What may bother Stone’s readers is not this uninterest in the scholarly staples so much as a curious unevenness of tone between the earlier and the later chapters of his account. In his introduction, Stone takes Socrates seriously, even if it is in no friendly ...”

“... and worries about struggles in his most private self that no one else will understand. This may seem at odds with the man who writes of his hunger for any sort of publicity, but throughout MacDiarmid’s career private anxieties and public pugnacity appear to have fuelled one another. The talented but vulnerable private individual could comfortably ...”

“... She thought she herself hardly possessed such a thing, whatever it was.’ A weak sense of oneself may make Alzheimer’s more tolerable: ‘Conceivably it is the persons who hug their identity most closely to themselves for whom the condition of Alzheimer’s is most dreadful. Iris’s own lack of a sense of identity seemed to float her more gently into its ...”