“... put an inarticulate or cowed individual in a difficult position. Although Beattie admits that he may have overemphasised and exaggerated the effects of the change, a great deal of the book is concerned with documenting these effects. He argues that there has long been a myth that English justice was special. Trial by jury and the adversarial system with the ...”

“... Our own Father Christmas – red and white like amanita, and borne aloft by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe used such homely drugs as belladonna, henbane and ...”

“... treatment of them is more summary and less animated by sympathy than the preceding chapters. There may be in this a recognition not only that the thread of the civic humanist tradition had been broken, but that Hazlitt did not possess the same standing in the debate over the public vocation of art. One thing that gives this book its extraordinary force is the ...”

“... is possible. If Marrot’s biography has an old-fashioned flavour even for its period, this may be partly because Galsworthy himself was, long before his death, an uneasy survivor from a vanished age. Younger than Conrad or Yeats or Kipling, his mind and outlook seem fixed, as theirs do not, in an epoch that itself did not survive his prime – and this ...”

“... Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any worthwhile thinking so long as you burden yourself with such a thing. I infer from Inglis’s reference to ‘the chic notation of the Parisian deconstructionists’ and from a footnote citing ...”

“... so much power and authority through modern technology. Not only in the Third World, of course: we may think of Irish bishops and the Polish Pope. A new cult among the Ivorians is called the Celestial Christians: they come from Ghana and have only been in the Ivory Coast for three years, so they are anxious to make their mark. Naipaul followed up one of their ...”

“... to the law of God, they were certainly very welcome. Whatever the term ‘secularisation’ may mean, it did not happen in 19th-century America, an age of enormous religious creativity and affirmation. The separation of church and state, in Virginia and most other States, did not remove religion from people’s daily lives. Indeed, because it allowed ...”

“... and episcopal apparatus of the Church. The Archbishop clearly thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on ...”

“... On their account, he withdrew his money and the film collapsed before a frame had been shot. He may have saved his family from the poorhouse by doing so, for Polanski, like the seven hammerlocking dwarfs, was a spectacular overspender. But Polanski is also, to invent a word, a grand overqualifier. He cannot help making films which are not only more ...”

“... out. In 1851, in a note on ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’, Ruskin wrote: ‘Now in order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it – not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation, but a ...”

“... with the assistance of no less than three researchers: ‘Some members of the wartime community may feel we might have made our consultation more extensive; we have confined it to points on which we needed to supplement or clarify the evidence of the surviving archives.’ The trouble is that their account of operations is based on the now outdated Official ...”

“... of these texts is that mankind deserves extermination, and they are wholesale extensions of what may once have been the satirist’s principal urge and perhaps his magical power: to kill his enemies or, in the sublimated version, to punish the world’s malefactors. There is a de- (or pre-) sublimated version, in which extermination proceeds at the mere whim ...”

“... ideology, erecting itself into a criterion by which the nobility itself could be judged. (‘You may be a lord, but I am afraid you will never be a gentleman.’) It was at the same moment that, as William Empson has described, a new direction was given to gentlemanliness by Fielding, both in the person of Squire Western and in his own life-history. The ...”

“... ensured its defeat at the polls. The Wilson era ended, in a sense, not on 16 March 1976, but on 3 May 1979. It ended in failure. In Final Term, the man who led the Labour Party for 13 years, and presided over nearly nine years of British decline, offers no sort of analysis of what went wrong and no kind of theory about what might go right. The book, I am ...”

“... to find out what is the smallest amount of money and the smallest number of men with which we may hope, some day, to win the war, or rather not to lose it, whereas the proper attitude is to see what is the greatest number of men we can put into the field in the shortest possible period of time, after thoroughly organising labour, eliminating all ...”