“... is fundamentally insoluble. The sociologist asks, What drives the scientist? and the scientist may reasonably reply: What drives the sociologist? At his best, the sociologist is driven by precisely those forces which he is inclined to deny the scientist. He wants to explain for explanation’s sake, for his own intellectual satisfaction. Of course, his ...”

“... probably skip the hermetic accounts of American football games, as earnest as Sportsnight. They may enjoy Reagan’s tales of his beginnings in radio, including the inadvertent signing-off of Aimée Semple McPherson, the evangelist, with a Mills Brothers record of ‘Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day’. And they’ll wince at his verdict on filming The ...”

“... that rivalry with his younger brother had been a serious problem from the start, that all may not have been well with his parents’ marriage, that he suffers from ‘not knowing how to value himself’, and that he now feels his childhood was not quite real. He castigates himself for his ‘habit of secretiveness’: ‘when you are not open with ...”

“... workings of government. It is amusing to find Crossman himself boswellised in these pages, as in May 1944: ‘Crossman says that he quite understands why so many civil servants, permanent and temporary, despise ministers and are always trying to do things which they think ought to be done, without letting ministers mow, for fear that they might try to stop ...”

“... some other party-guest is receiving the benefit of his subsequent revelations. Gerald’s Party may be fun to contemplate, but it is hell to read. Neither carnivalesque invention, half-hearted allegory nor literary parody can obscure the fact that this is a tediously over-inflated extravaganza, a funhouse both brutal and boring. The satirical intent and ...”

“... have to be expressed. The idea of unity in any field – political, psychological or artistic – may have its own drawbacks, even its own dangers. The age-old wish for unity and happy integration, for a golden time way back from the present, or to be realised in the immediate future, does not necessarily relate to anything that makes for actual human ...”

“... it) the Soviet Union. Lord Moggerhanger is looking for a new chauffeur and courier. Protest as he may about keeping his hands clean, Cullen is the sort of permanent adolescent who (having failed to become a sailor, a pilot or an engine-driver) would do almost anything to get behind the wheel of another man’s Rolls-Royce. Naturally he cannot resist Lord ...”

“... world:               Figures ever new Rise on the bubble, paint them as you may; We have but thrown, as those before us threw, Our shadows on it as it passed away. Keach emphasises that only in an ideally-transformed world could language have constitutive or Orphic power; in the world as he found it, Shelley knew, with Bacon, that ...”

“... reduced his scientific loyalties to mere lip service. ‘His mind,’ says Janet Oppenheim, ‘may have imagined itself at home in a scientist’s laboratory, but Myers’s heart always yearned for a church.’ Alfred Russel Wallace also was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, but he was even less affected by its scientific slant despite the ...”

“... and given to ‘voyeurism’ and even to ‘intellectual onanism’, whatever that may mean. The celibate clergy are described, without a hint of irony, as ‘phallocentric’. A reader does not have to be an apologist for the old regime, or even, for that matter, for the Church, to feel that Darmon’s moralising approach, much coarser as well ...”

“... Adam Smith’s picture of economic life to all of life, whatever the cause of this pattern may be; and the insight that the artist or the philosopher who thinks he is not pursuing bourgeois goals because he is not crassly pursuing money may still be acting like an entrepreneur is a disturbing one. I find it harder to ...”

“... and so on. The effect is not unlike a Chinese Memoirs of Hadrian. At the end one may be uncertain whether the text is a novel or a history, whether the voice is that of the Emperor or his historian, but the author’s skill and perceptiveness are not in doubt. It is difficult to think of a study which better deserves the description ...”

“... have been conferred on C/7044 Pte C.E. Peel, had he lived’. The letter is dated Winchester, 10 May 1921. ‘In forwarding the Decoration I am commanded by the King to assure you of His Majesty’s high appreciation of the services rendered.’ Even as a small child rooting for biscuits, I can see that His Majesty’s high appreciation doesn’t amount to ...”

“... of the entrepreneurial spirit to the rise of literary criticism. And yet it sounds so curious. We may worry about imports, like Henry Ryecroft, but we don’t infer morality from butter. We may worry about war, like Lord Salisbury, but we don’t infer rivalry between nations from a Darwinian rivalry between species. Those ...”

“... Both she and Brookner give the impression of having their ‘secret’, and, however vulgar this may sound, it does unquestionably add to our sense of their work, and to our pleasure in it. Contact with a personality is one of the most obvious joys of novel-reading, but how very seldom is such a contact provocative and absorbing, or even interesting. In our ...”