“... so hard-worked. We are told repeatedly how Shakespeare’s spectators, or ‘some’ of them, ‘may’ or ‘might’ or ‘may well’ or ‘might well’ have responded to the plays or to scenes in them. The book is unavoidably an exercise not in proof but in grounded speculation (or mostly grounded: Lake does have his ...”

“... drone in 2011.The record of this year’s wars shows that although these weapons may not provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement, projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell persists even when they are ...”

“... or ‘nativist’ trend in present-day cognitive psychology.Various reasons for his invisibility may be given. In the first place, he had the misfortune to be appropriated, edited and ‘Hamiltonised’, as Keith Lehrer puts it, by the respectable but inferior philosopher Sir William Hamilton. In the second place, he suffered greatly in the collapse of the ...”

“... next three years, including the right to negotiate a new constitution with the Government, this may not have mattered too much. The subsequent NEC elections showed the strength of the SACP/MK bloc, with SACP members occupying five of the top eight spots. There was and is endless speculation over how many SACP members there are on the new NEC, with guesses ...”

“... is especially noteworthy, however, is Brougham’s own suggestion ‘that a very honest mistake may have been the cause of the misunderstanding.’ The trouble with – and for – Brougham was that mistakes and misunderstandings became so frequent as to generate pervasive doubts as to his honesty. At what was to be in more ways than one the decisive moment ...”

“... was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is pretty scanty and unreliable at most stages of his life, but a copy of his birth certificate ...”

“... subdue his tribal pride. By ‘Anglican’ Sisson means ‘English’. The Welsh, Scots and Irish may, perhaps, be permitted to eat the bread that falls from the masters’ table. He lists among ‘the disasters which have overtaken the Church of England in recent years’ both the Rome-favouring tendency and the ecumenicism – ‘the retreat from the claim ...”

“... of historical detection on this scale from which they are not exempt. A fresh and inquisitive eye may on occasion observe something which those more familiar with a subject have missed, but where a highly complex topic, such as the history of the Knights Templar or of Christian origins, is got up for a specific purpose, with the research carried out, as it ...”

“... The Mirror is cracked and the images confused. It is part of the history of the British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up in the North of England forty years ago, the press was an honourable estate. At the centenary of the birth of C.P. Scott, The Making of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was an ideal anthology for ...”

“... her Art in 1939. The fact that Burrows writes like Austen herself is splendid. But other people may write well, and not get the much smaller sums they ask for, so it’s worth considering why those who put our money into this project seem so triumphantly vindicated. English literature is an academic discipline that has grown ever more numerous and ever more ...”

“... us firmly in narrating rather than narrated time. And of course destiny itself, whatever else it may be, is always a narrative effect, the insertion of a later perspective (real or imagined) into an earlier one. We may be a little surprised to see Iris Murdoch playing with the Russian Formalists’ distinction of story and ...”

“... important and irretrievably contentious. The personnel of the ‘Modern Masters’ series may simply map the credal disorder of our days, the fitful intellectual allegiances of a society of masterless persons. Past Masters, however, are, or at any rate ought to be, figures of historically proven authority. It is easiest to see historically proven ...”

“... last major speech, delivered to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on 11 May 1979. The complete text has been reprinted by CND under the heading ‘The Speech We Ignored’. The question is: who is ‘we’? Not the disarmament lobby, surely, for Mountbatten was only articulating what its members have been saying for generations ...”

“... In the quite different context of writing to Cassandra in 1796, the adoption of such language may have served to guard genuine tears and badly hurt feelings. (One branch of the Lefroy family maintained the view that ‘Tom … behaved so ill to Jane Austen.’) Perhaps something of the seriousness of her private emotions, and of her determined efforts to ...”

“... has entered, and many suspect that under the name of ‘criticism’ all kinds of illegal goods may be smuggled in. Customs is instructed to make a proper search. Is ‘criticism’ a hidden agenda for Marxism, Lacanianism, structuralist anti-humanism etc? Originally, the resistance to allowing criticism the curricular dignity of, say, the Age of Pope came ...”