“... by gassing, starvation and lethal injection to their doctors’ ‘aristocratic’ values. David Blackbourn took the lead in dismantling this paradigm. With Geoff Eley, he wrote The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in 19th-Century Germany (1984), which attacked the new orthodoxy on a number of fronts. Blackbourn’s main ...”

“... or not it is fair to run out the batsman at the bowler’s end when he thinks the ball is dead. In David Horspool’s new study of sport in Britain, the great flashpoints and turning points mostly concern exclusions and discriminations, bans and bars, whether of race, gender or class, often showing human beings at their meanest and most paranoid. Stuffiness ...”

“... considered sinful in their time: they are Rahab the harlot, Bathsheba who was tempting to King David, Tamar who coaxed her father-in-law – and even Ruth, who crept under the bedclothes of Boaz, her kinsman. Does not this suggest that Matthew wanted to show that Mary was descended from ‘sinners’? This is far-fetched. We are not convinced that Matthew ...”

“... his own emotions ebbed and flowed. In April 1915 he was ‘mad with misery and hostility’ over David Garnett’s entanglement with Bloomsbury homosexuality. A year later came Lawrence’s abortive effort at blutbrüderschaft with John Middleton Murry. In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William ...”

“... plays has been televisioned, as you say/KatUllus izza poek; all right. vurry good eggzesize fer young Jaz ... Anyhow lez see the new muggerzeum as fer Horse/trail/ier?? Gheez you are a glutton fer punishment ... or are you doin’ it to allay fambly suspicion?? If Hostrailia cd/sing Bach, muvver!!! As fer Murdering the CareDRAWL ... waal no new ...”

“... If language speaks us, as Lacan claimed, and as Aron – the young protagonist of The Book of Intimate Grammar – senses intuitively, then our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms and even the act of investigating and naming the self is both arbitrary and suspect. A lost language would mean a misplaced self; and indeed, Aron has caught a fleeting and provocative glimpse of a shadow father behind the father he knows, a lithe and animated Papa who is telling a joke in the Polish forbidden by Mama, and who is attached like a vibrant ghost to the sad overweight present-day Papa, the one who protests forlornly: ‘But there are some things I can only say in Polish ...”

“... of the early 1990s. Over the Barlow Clowes fiasco, the Government, represented by Ernst and Young, sued Touche Ross; over BCCI, Touche Ross sued Ernst and Young and Price Waterhouse. Over Atlantic Computers, Price Waterhouse sued Touche Ross. Over Wallace Smith, KPMG sued Coopers and Lybrand. Over London United ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... with it, as he suggests in the account of a primal scene he gave in an interview with David Sylvester: Childhood’s important to me, and it’s when I first came into contact with art. This happened when I was around four or five. One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box. It’s a kind of sexual experience at that age ...”

“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... is a very delicate time,’ we are told in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (1965), and again in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation. None of that ‘a long time ago’ stuff, especially since we’re not talking about the past. The action takes place in the first months of the year 10191. The year is also mentioned in Denis Villeneuve’s new version, which ...”

“... George Michael (‘breaking a six-year silence’). Guest editors have included Damien Hirst and David Bailey – Big Issue chic. The ads say something, too: Levis, Sony, Calvin Klein, Bacardi; British Nuclear Fuels, a contentious issue in the office, soon pulled; some of the best clients are Rizla and Drum Tobacco, which says something else. They also now ...”

“... our hosts bringing with him his teenage son plus a bottle of wine, hoping that Sue would take the young man into the woods and initiate him into the arts of love. None of them had any doubt that this was a woman of the world whereas Sue was actually quite shy and couldn’t see that she had given them any cause to think otherwise. She hadn’t; she just ...”

“... If Dartmouth wonders why she loves freedom so deeply, he need look no further than her own past:I, young in life, by seeming cruel fateWas snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:What pangs excruciating must molest,What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’dThat from a father seiz’d his babe ...”

“... one of the dogs (very likely rabid, according to the professor). ‘What’s in it?’ I ask, but David, my husband, refuses to commit himself. That’s what you get for marrying into the trade. How will I manage not to breathe the smoke? It’s everywhere. The burnt, dusty men who work the dump are unmoved by the arrival of a coach bringing well-dressed ...”