“... until two years after the Regency was established, he repeatedly describes her as a Georgian. That may be justified if the implication is that her intellect was formed early in her life, but to establish the point would take a deal more exploration of the discernible intellectual influences than the professor provides. It would take more than exploration to ...”

“... out of sight by the boots of the man behind him. It is a disturbing and unexpected ending, and it may draw on one of the ‘forgotten attitudes’ to which Kee refers in his introduction. One’s first reaction to it is that it is an error, not of the character’s feeling but of the writer’s judgment, to concede the authority which an ending inevitably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the two of them then enacted a little dance or jig to express their pleasure. The occasion may be compared with Mrs Bessie Braddock’s notorious celebration in the newly-elected House of Commons of 1945, when she marked the absence of Winston Churchill from the government Front Bench with a few rhythmic steps. This endearing scene was surprising in ...”

“... in Time, and indeed of all fictional situations which posit the possibility of travel in time. We may be secure in the knowledge that the North defeated the South in the American Civil War. But this does not stop a deranged American army officer from using the time machine to try and forestall the repugnant result. Nor does it absolve the ruthlessly alert ...”

“... sheeps’ guts, a jumble of historical and contemporary costumes, leaden daggers and Hell mouths may seem oddly assorted, Hattaway suggests, but, quaint now, they had a coherence at the time which forbids our condescension. Yet the force of this is somehow lost as the argument is crystallised back into the theory which gave it birth: ‘Costume in fact was a ...”

“... broth, or something or other’. She and Mary had to sit up to wake him from nightmares. ‘You may think we were busy enough.’ Busy indeed they were, incredibly, devotedly busy, and only about poor Coleridge does Dorothy ever reveal any resentment of the fact. Frugal and temperate as he was, William was not always demanding coffee ‘or something or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and discouragement more often than is generally thought. One such occasion occurred in May 1962. General Salan, one of the leaders of the unsuccessful putsch in Algiers the previous year and now the leader of the Organisation Armée Secrète which was trying to foment civil war, had been arrested and put on trial for his life. His lawyers turned ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... after thousands of its denizens have died of Aids and as many as 70 per cent, it is now thought, may have contracted the disease. In its heyday in the early Seventies Castro was the cutting edge of the gay revolution, the place where thousands of young men (and some women) flocked from all over the country to enjoy a totally new kind of freedom. Gay ...”