“... into the civil service. In the other faculties, principally philosophy and the sciences, there was little discrepancy. Among non-Jews, there was a considerable tendency to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, whether into the public service (civil or military) or law or medicine. What is significant about the Jewish sample is the much greater proportion of ...”

“... as ‘wynde’. But these are the opening, not the closing lines of Amiens’s little piece and (more important) the piece is a song, whereas both the Browning poems are for the speaking voice. Moreover, we shall seldom recite either poem and in silent reading asymmetry will register willy-nilly to the eye: for the point is not how we speak ...”

“... to see a critic simply plough Proust’s complex and majestic ideation under the jolly language of Arthur Quiller-Couch. Having stripped Proust of half his wealth, the rest of Bayley’s essay expires into biographical gossip – pauper’s criticism. Bayley’s reviews repeat, at a lower level, the concerns of his more considered work. As Percy Lubbock was ...”

“... his struggle as Postmaster-General to have stamps issued without the Queen’s head, occupies no little part of these diaries, and in both cases Benn argues that, though the issues were small, they provide a chilling insight into the machinations of the Establishment and the dense and pervasive network which operates in this country to throttle democratic ...”

“... historiography or jurisprudence. He is joined in this appeal by philosophers of physics like Arthur Fine, who asks us to abandon the assumption that natural science ‘is special, and that scientific thinking is unlike any other’. Putnam and Fine both ridicule the idea that the discourse of physics is somehow more in touch with reality than any other ...”

“... life and this punitive regime was brutal. And then, when Blunkett was 12, his father died. Because Arthur Blunkett had been working after pensionable age – his employer, the East Midlands Gas Board, had asked him to stay on to train new employees – they initially refused to pay compensation. The resulting legal struggles his mother went through ...”

“... they didn’t know something about their subject instead of veering off into fiction. They took little notice. Schneer is endearingly open about the holes in the exceedingly tattered and piecemeal record of the Lockhart plot, some the result of weeding and redaction by intelligence services, some the work of nervous letter-burners, some just missing. When ...”

“... yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes on, with complaints and threats stacking up like Brexit-blocked containers.At the outset, the BBC’s fragile autonomy owed as much to ...”

“... will know that this man used to exist.’ The pseudo-sophisticated belief that the Chinese care little about individual or human rights, however difficult these may be to realise in a Chinese context, should not survive a reading of these pages. ‘In my first year at university I felt I was surrounded by people in chains. But occasionally I would read ...”

“... are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and who knew the late Arthur Humphries (professor of English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait (although it is not at all malicious) furnished its ...”

“... and blame its continuing presence more on multicultural ‘balkanisation’ (the term belongs to Arthur Schlesinger Jr) than on the white resentment which they, in some measure, share. Or in time-honoured minstrel tradition, new Democrats black up political programmes with African American cultural identification: programmes directed against the inner ...”

“... or divined concealed rules. It was the decade, too, of what one might call ludic taxonomy. From Arthur Koestler’s 1942 essay we learnt to divide our friends into yogis and commissars; from Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 book to characterise the world’s thinkers as hedgehogs or foxes; from Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From ...”

“... of their attention. She gives us the domestic detail; records of the Artois courts give us a little more. Like many educated young men of the time, Robespierre cultivated his sensibilities. He wrote a little light verse. He was sociable, up to a point. He had women friends. He could easily have married. Except for his ...”

“... foreign policy’. The bipartisan support for the president’s bombing campaigns shows that little has changed in this respect, however. As Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny ...”

“... appearance, has largely reverted in old age to a state of Blakean innocence and moral simplicity. (Little Lamb – you rackety old thing – who did make thee? I have some questions I’d like to ask Him.) True: ravages of macular degeneration notwithstanding, she still spends an hour every morning ‘putting her face on’, with predictably fantastical, Isak ...”